https://samarahersch.com/works/call-me-anytime-you-want/
A long distance conversation about love, birth, soap operas and missed calls.
For the past three years Samara has been living and studying in Amsterdam. During this time, she was often on the phone with her cousin Zac, back in Australia.
“Call me anytime you want”, is a phrase he’d often say to her as they’d hang up the phone.
Since lock down they have been speaking every night at 10pm.
These phone calls last no more than 3 minutes and always end with the promise of another call, the next night.
The short, serial nature of the calls started to feel like a soap opera, a genre that Zac is very familiar with. Every day at 4:30pm he watches the American soap opera, Bold and the Beautiful. He even quit a job at a salad bar because he couldn’t get home in time for 4:30pm.
Samara’s practice explores conversation as performance and performance as conversation. She is particularly interested in ways to stage absence and in exploring notions of presence, of remote performance and of the tension between distance and intimacy. Call Me Anytime You Want is a conversation about being together, across physical and emotional distances and is an attempt to fantasize about all the things the future may or may not provide.
Connecting through the intimacy of a phonecall
comment added 25.3.2025:
- "During Italian lockdown in 2020, Marche Teatro borrowed the \"Poetical consultancy\" format by Fabrice Melquiot to offer the audience a Poetry-Doctor consultation against isolation. Someone will call you on a specific time and date, have a brief chat about who you are and what you were experiencing in lockdown, and prescribed you a poem, that the Doctor will read."