May I ask you for a recollection?

Dear People,

I'm a young sound artist from Brussels, Belgium.


I’m currently building a new installation called soundtracks, and I need your help. The idea behind soundtracks is to build an archive of memories of sound. Memories of sounds that were important to you, that struck you or stayed with you. Soundtracks wants to research which kind of sounds get remembered, and how they are remembered. Can we hear those sounds again in our heads, or can we only remember the circumstances of the situation; the outlines, the edges of the sound?

And that’s why I would like to ask you to take a moment and try to find your recollection of a sound, a sound that was important to you. And I would want to ask you to write down your memory, on paper. And if you could send that memoy by post to this address:

Soundtracks
Hopstraat 40
1000 Brussels
Belgium



You can find some more info on Soundtracks on this URL:

http://versonatura.org/audio/stijn/stijnWsoundtracks.html


I'm posting this in a creative writing because I believe (auto)biographical writing is also a form of creative writing. I'm interested in your stories, your views. Your personal history. That's also the reason why I'm asking for handwritten memories, because the more personal, the better.


I thank you in advance,
I'm indebted to you all

Kind regards,

Stijn Demeulenaere

Ps: It’s important that the memories are written by hand, so please, no emails or typed letters.


addition:

I have received some questions about what this has to do with creative writing, or why the letters need to be hand written. Here’s the answer.

To me, creative writing is more than just fiction. It’s also about the exploration of feelings, of memories and opinions? How do I describe them as best and as beautiful as possible? Before I switched to the medium sound, I used to dabble in writing. And to this day, I sometimes feel the need to describe the stuff that happens in my life as good as possible. I need to do it because that way I can explore and analyse what’s happened to me. (Auto)biographical writing is for me just as well a form of creative writing. Apart from that I noticed that people who like to write are exactly the ones enjoying the challenge of describing a sound. Precisely because it is a new, a different way of thinking about the things. Soundtracks also refers to the practice of acoustic ecology where researchers try to comprehend how the world used to sound in the past, and what of the sound image of the world has changed since then. Very often they use texts and descriptions of sounds by writers to explore the soundworld that existed before the advent of recording devices.


Why do I need hand-written letters?
Good question,

there's 3 reasons why I'm asking for handwritten memories. First of all, (and the most important reason) I'm asking for your input because i want to hear your stories, your memories, and the more personal those memories, the better. A hand-written memory is just much more personal, it's a piece of yourself that becomes a part of the memory, a little personal history. Also, a hand-written letter creates a direct, tangible link between the person writing the memory down, and the person later on who's reading that particular memory during an exhibition.

The second reason is a bit less relevant for writers, but I’ll mention it anyway. It's a method for making people think about the memories their writing down. It's a whole different thing siting down, taking pen and paper and actually writing something down, than just quickly typing something in on a webpage behind your computer. The goal of the installation is to confront you with your own memory, and to see if you can actually recreate, rehear that sound in your head. That happens best in the more intimate exercise of writing a letter.

Third, it's just way more beautiful and interesting to exhibit the different memories, written down on different kinds of paper in different handwriting, than just exhibiting print outs of a bunch of emails. Handwriting gives the installation a kind of soul it would not have otherwise

and last addition: the installation will be shown for the first time in Amsterdam, on the 19th of february during Cloud Sounds, an exhibition by the Dutch Institute for Media Arts http://nimk.nl/eng/agenda/cloud-sounds