Recorded at radio pic nic, Geneva, 2021

On How to be NICE

Reading aloud in a group is a singular experience. To call it “nice” casually, would be an understatement unless, like with the word “kind”, we begin to think of these adjectives as experiences. It is NICE to be sitting on the floor with a group of women who take care of the words they pronounce: words which form into sentences, and paragraphs, and ideas, and questions. We are recorded, so we focus and we treat words with a particular kindness of attention, which makes them resound in the space of the studio, but also within ourselves and each other. It is NICE when we all notice the changes in pace, mood, flow of space and time. Certain words need to be pronounced many times, while others, said only once, offer an echo to someone’s change of posture or rhythm. It is NICE that the words we are reading are so powerful – this “niceness” has a particular depth of lived experience, of empathy and of love because these words circulate through us and amongst us.
But there is also another side. It is NICE that the words we are reading carry a kind of deep caring that we may not have encountered before. It is NICE that the subjects treated in the text are as varied as anger, self-doubt, fatigue, confusion. It is NICE that someone actually sat down and wrote these words, and that somebody else made us read the out loud. I was relentlessly taught to be nice, to play nice – I was made to be a nice girl. It took time and reading aloud and these women to figure out that it was the other NICE I wanted.

Text Anna Iatsenko
Photo Angela Marzullo

Voices Caroline Palla, Anna Iatsenko, Rosangela Gramoni, Sarah Zürcher, Nathalie Mastail-Hirosawa, Erzsi Kukorelly