Once written down, stories become texts. Texts can be read and distributed, but they can also be banned, burnt, lost, or simply forgotten. But if stories are preserved and remembered by people, it is harder to suppress their spreading. All it takes is a narrator capable of reciting a story in a specific space and an audience that can hear it. Thereby, storytelling has the potential to bring back what has been erased, blackened, hidden, or was never written. Dialogs from the Darkroom installs an apparatus that catalyzes and assists the process of this recovery. The protagonists of the apparatus are “storytellers”, experts from various fields from Novosibirsk, along with selected theorists and artists from Berlin, St. Petersburg, and Moscow.
The apparatus consists of six units (the waiting room, the office, the cinema, the studio, arena and the kitchen) the audience are invited to traverse. They present various speech acts in different formats, live and on video: expert lectures and dialogs, charismatic consultations, kitchen gossips, recited and performed texts. All units operate simultaneously. The audience can walk through the installation like in an exhibition, connecting themselves to any part of the apparatus they are attracted to via a ten channel audio system. The empty top floor of a Novosibirsk luxury fashion store will provide an unusual space for the set-up.