Are you a doctor, sir?

A sound work for the related events curated by Bjørk Grue Lidn around the exhibition: Agata Cardosa, And Hysteria, Soma Gallery, Berlin

'Are you a doctor, sir?' is the question Katharina asks of Sigmund Freud, in the lodging-house of his summer holiday in the Höhe Tauern. He goes there to forget medicine and the neuroses, and almost succeeds. Her story is one of the four case histories in Studies on Hysteria, where Freud begins to move towards the flow of free association. There is Katharina, and Frau Emmy von N., and Miss Lucy R., and Fräulein Elisabeth von R. They speak, and their words, the moments when events are recounted, subject to my revision and selection, are spoken by Gabrielle Abbott, Natalie Allistone, Manca Bajec, Sutapa Biswas, Jennifer Booth, Alison J. Carr, Heather Connelly, Cinzia Cremona, Karen di Franco, Clare Dove, Laura Gonzalez, Helen Goodwin, Rose-Anne Gush, Suzanne Hale, Lou Hazelwood, Lizzie Hughes, Alana Lake, Claire Manning, Kristin Mojsiewicz, Sadie Murdoch, Tamarin Norwood, Gilly Pawson, Claire Potter, Many Prowse, Olivia Punnett, Gabriella Sancisi, Erica Scourti, Janine Siddall-Burton, Isabella Streffen, Laima Vanaga, Eva Vaslamatzi, and Gillian Wylde. Kivland's readers have recorded their reading of her scripts, which also belong to Freud, Katharina, Frau Emmy, Miss Lucy, and Fräulein Elisabeth. In the printed text, the tone changes between four characters. In the recording, the tone changes between thirty-two readers. The inflection, accent, delivery of each is singular, even as they speak the words of another.