Pick up the landline handset and dial a number to hear a poem. The wind phone (風の電話, kaze no denwa) is an unconnected telephone booth in Ōtsuchi, Japan, where visitors can dial the dead. A new audio work by local poet Izzy Roberts-Orr extending on her collection of elegies, Raw Salt.
Installed all afternoon at Blackwood Cemetery, 35 Byres Rd Wurundjeri Country, Blackwood
‘In Otsuchi, there is a phone booth
where you can dial the dead.
Kaze no denwa, the wind phone
carries your words on the currents
but air is not the same thing as breath.’
- from ‘imbibed aubade’, in Raw Salt by Izzy Roberts-Orr