Dragan Todorovic – “Who will talk of small towns?”

When writer/sound artist Dragan Todorovic answered the call to ‘dialogue’ with Italo Calvino, author of Invisible Cities, he explained to Earlid’s curator, “Calvino’s happens to be one my favourite books of all times, and so you’ve hit the right note by choosing that to be a point of questioning.”

By way of artist ‘interview,’ Todorovic unfurled a new text [In This Language I Shall Live] and a new sound piece.

“I live now in a small town in England. Leamington Spa is a place of about 55,000 people, of which a quarter are students of Warwick University. We’ve moved here for my partner’s work (she’s teaching in theatre studies), and I continued to write. The plan was to spend here a few years, then go back to Toronto. But then I started teaching creative writing, and we remain here indefinitely. 

My audio is very much awoken progress. This morning I’ve discovered some rough spots and I need to add an important sentence, so that’ll be done tomorrow.”

Todorovic is always listening to the voices that emanate across the waters of language—his native Serbian and his adopted tongue. He writes in English with poetic ease; his sound artistry asks more questions, is ‘in-progress,’ than it answers. His is a lyric sound that opens vaults towards more curious melding.

Is that William Burroughs who is invited to speak along with the friendly small-town grocery clerk? Calvino’s weary emperor meets the energetic traveler. Anything can unravel.

For more detail and other sound work, visit Earlid: solace & friction.

Audio, Dragan Todorovic, 2016. Photo/montage, Silvija Jestrovic, 2016.