2025
Land Line pt.1
A storytelling experience exploring the threads of migration through personal narrative and sound.
Land Line pt.1 is an experimental storytelling event exploring migration, memory, and belonging through the intimacy of sound. The telephone—long a lifeline connecting migrants, travelers, and lovers to distant voices—becomes both medium and metaphor. Storytellers phone in live from around the world, sharing true stories of movement, transition, and homecoming.
By stripping the performance of visual distractions, Four One Nine’s gallery is transformed into a sanctuary for connection, where strangers’ voices become trusted companions in the dark. Musical interludes respond to and extend the emotional resonance of each story, creating an immersive soundscape of memory.
Land Line challenges conventional performance by centering absence as presence—voices traveling across distance to form a shared, communal act of listening.
Land Line pt.1 brought together the story of a poet returning to Côte d’Ivoire, a Palestinian author’s childhood memory of leaving home, and a cross-border romance. Each story was shared live through the telephone.
Reflection
As curators and producers, we saw how technology, often associated with detachment, could instead become a vessel for empathy. In the end, Land Line was less a performance than a shared moment of presence across distance—a reminder that even the simplest call can bridge entire worlds.
