Love Letters Hotline & Audio Tour
The Love Letters Hotline & Audio Tour is a project initiated by the Office of Queer Affairs (OoQA) in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven that explroes the extent by which a collective, local, queer voice can both literally and figuratively intervene on the musuem's collection presentation.
role: concept, research, development, technical setup, server maintanence, bi-annual submission processing
- Love Letters Tour on Smartify
- Delinking and Relinking Exhbition at Van Abbemuseum
- Call Love Letters Hotline 02 02 05 01 05
The project consists of a community-built, semi-conversational, always-in-the-making interactive audio tour that is co-built by members of the Office of Queer Affairs (OoQA) and Eindhoven's local queer community.
We departed from a selection of 12 artworks and annotated them with personal ads inpired by the 90's "On Our Backs"-style lesbian personals. These ads are written from the "POV of the artwork" and can be found dispersed in the exhibition space and in the audio tour.
Each personal ad prompts the reader/listener with a question related to their interpersonal experiences of queerness in relation to the artwork. They are invited to respond by calling a phone number and leaving a message. This "Love Letter" is automatically added to a queue, and twice a year, we inspect the queue of Love Letters, select a few and manually publish them to the tour.
Year after year, the audio tour cummulatively grows and transforms into a conversational piece
Apart from collective ideation, development, and co-management of the project, I was responsible for the initial technical setup of the Love Letters phone line and server and designing and building the phone menu.
The tour has been translated to Dutch and NGT (Dutch Sign Language), is hosted by Smartify and is accessible on their website and in their app.
