THE HEARING VOICES CAFÉ PAPER - COLOMBO

The designation “Hearing Voices Café” applies to every well patronized coffee shop. At the same time, the phrase “hearing voices” is also associated with the phenomenon of hearing inner voices. Drawing on the ambiguity of the term, Colomboscope interdisciplinary arts festival 2021, artists Jayampathi Guruge and Dora García, collaborators and guests are installing a gathering place for people who hear voices and for voices who need to be heard, hosted by the Viharamahadevi Park Cafeteria.

The Hearing Voices Café Paper is the publication corresponding to a new edition of The Hearing Voices Café in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as part of the festival Colomboscope (20-30 January 2022).The Hearing Voices Café is a dialogic structure initiated in 2014 in Hamburg, having traveled ever since across Europe and North America. The Hearing Voices Café is a meeting place, hosted by an existing - and fully functioning - café, where everyone related to the phenomenon of "voice hearing", voice hearers, or(political, social) voices that have been silenced for too long, their family and friends, researchers, curious,can meet to talk, without stigma. The ambiguity of the term "hearing voices” is put to good use by this structure, underlining the political load of the dissidence from the "normal", and the relation of thisdissidence with creativity. The Paper is an essential part of The Café, as promotion and dissemination of the project and its contents, but also as a means of visual and text expression for everyone being part in one or the other way of the Café.