credit: Words

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.”

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Two strangers and the illusion of a life lived together.

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

Listen and Read

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.

Two new parents-to-be contemplate what it means to navigate the limitations of the identities their son will inherit.

The desire to protect and shelter is fraught with the anticipation that one day he will move in a world having to know in some way what it means to be racialised as black, gendered as a man and everything in between. Featuring the voices of Kate Williams, Dean Atta and Ansel Wong.

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

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.”