The auditory tube

Everyone who has read Leonora Carrington's century novel The Audio Tube knows: It is an unleashing of literary energy and a surrealist-revolutionary attack on the lack of humor and alternatives of patriarchal power. The 92-year-old eponymous heroine revolts together with other elderly and outcasts: What if the world had taken a path other than that of greed and violence?

Carrington answers with humor and takes the world literally in its grotesque details. Her heroes are “freaks,” to use a word from Ulrike Ottinger's work: hopefuls, because they are unsuitable and therefore open up spaces for new thinking and change. They are endangered and vulnerable. It is precisely this vulnerability that turns into strength that gives the story its irrepressible power.

Ulrike Ottinger, the queen of transdisciplinary resistance to authority and uniformity in art, theatre and cinema, met Carrington in Chicago in 1991. Back then, they came up with the plan for an adaptation of Das Hörrohr. 35 years later, this idea became reality on Gorky.

Carrington's surrealist world theatre meets Ottinger's own world of images and ideas: with her fascination for outsiders, eccentrics and figures who evade the rules of their time. On stage, this creates a world between grotesque and utopia, in which age becomes revolutionary energy, imagination becomes political force and the supposedly inadequate becomes the starting point of a new order.

The theatre event is accompanied by an exhibition with further works by Ulrike Ottinger.

This project is made possible by funds from the Capital Cultural Fund.