credit: Words

What is the etymology of your being?

Axel Kacoutié offers a vivid personal essay reflecting on language, bilingualism and the curated gaps they have to navigate in order to access their culture and sense of self.

“Your language is a spell, an invocation speaking you into existence, rediscovering the contours of your morality, the fabric of your race and gender and how you relate to others and the world…”

Featuring the voices of the poet Raymond Antrobus and performance artist Rachel Cheung, Axel weaves together the thoughts of a number of multilingual people – including Derick Armah, Irina Niculescu, Mauricio Loseto, Olivia Melkonian, Radhika Viswanathan and Rosel Jackson Stern – into a reflection on living between languages and finding yourself in the gaps.

Illustration: Erin Tse
Animation: Luke Dye-Montefiore

Produced by Axel Kacoutié
A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Awards:

Prix Marulić Grand Prix Award 2022

Best Factual Producer Audio Production Awards 2022

Produced Episdoes by Axel Kacoutié

Miniatures produced by Axel Kacoutié

What art thou?

Please do not touch the paintings or other exhibits, and do not cross barriers.

“A frenzy exultations she commands with soft vibrations
that induce a meditation
from her touch, ah! from her vivifying touch upon my skin.”

Read More

Two strangers and the illusion of a life lived together.

“All that’s drunk and high, All that’s sexy and clots. All that’s loose and tight, all that withers and rots, Let them in, let them in.

Read in full

Waking in the Temple by Axel Kacoutié (the signal house edition issue #5)

A version of a memory where Bram Stoker’s Dracula became medicine for one dark night.

About Night Vision: In new after-hours listening on Radio 4, the team behind the award-winning Wireless Nights present three acoustically rich journeys through three long nights of the soul. Nights that left an indelible mark on the storyteller.

(image: Courbevoie, Factories by Moonlight (ca. 1882–1883) by Georges Seurat)

Five radio producers from around the world hijack The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3’s innovative Between the Ears features in miniature, in response to Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’.

In this edition, Axel Kacoutié offers a story about a man’s journey home, which interweaves with the discovery of a lesser-known truth about hope.

Gold for the Sarah Lawrence Audio Fiction Awards.

Judges comments:
This piece broke the judges to tears – with its subtle sound design that make you feel the vibration of the trains, and the tunnels that comes and goes and pushes the mind of the listeners into this world of metaphors that transforms you; with its rhythmisation of expansion and closeness. Paradise shows what you can expect from audio fiction; that you can experience the world as if for the first time.

We are wrong to look for uniformity and objectivity. We have all mapped associations to what our subjective experience is like.

My experience of the colour red is different from yours. Our brains light up the same way when hearing water but our relationship to its sounds will never be the same.

Because of this, I wanted to illustrate how I’ve mapped mine using abstract terms like solitude, sunbathing, patricide etc. All as an attempt to say, “you don’t have to understand, I just want to connect and have you see (listen) how I relate to the world.”