The sound walk The Graveyard Digression asks the question “What can a cemetery teach us?“, as well as others, in an approximately 30 minute long sound journey passing through St. Pauli Southern Cemetery in Malmö.
This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2024.
Below, we the collective behind the piece, Public Retreat, talk about the work.
During the fall of 2023, PUBLIC RETREAT participated in the group exhibition Scores for Gröndal / Scores for Malmö at SPARK in Malmö, Sweden. We were invited to create a score, an open-ended methodology or proposal, focusing on how to engage with public space, inspired by artists such as Yoko Ono and Pauline Oliveros. The goal was to involve the public in our creative process, offering them a means to engage with their surroundings in new, introspective ways.
For this exhibition, we created a situated, guided, and meditative sound work about graveyards as public space, The Graveyard Digression, accompanied by a spatial installation comprised of a gravelled, raised, surface, about the size of a burial ground, and a manuscript that was performed as a theatrical performance reading during the exhibition’s opening evening.
As our team is based in three different cities, none being Malmö, we reflected on the challenges of creating site-specific work from a distance. Our initial exploration into the concept of the “score”, and how it could connect with our artistic interests, led us to consider creating context-specific work instead of solely site-specific work. The gallery, located in central Malmö, became our focal point. During collective video chats, we explored digital maps and quickly discovered that one of Malmö’s green belts, a series of graveyards, runs through the city and passes right by the gallery.
Digressions as process and work in itself
This discovery sparked an associative thought process leading to, among many things, discussions on death in the urban world, the administration of the deceased, whether the dead can hear, burial practices, who else inhabits the graveyard, and the role of grief. Jo Mikkel, part of Public Retreat, his personal experience as a cemetery caretaker in Oslo added depth to these conversations. It became clear that graveyards, in addition to being sacred resting places, serve as archives of stories, witnesses to the city’s development, its pasts, and its futures.
In the Nordic countries, graveyards also function as recreational spaces, blending the sacred with the everyday. The graveyard is simultaneously spiritual and utilitarian, a space loaded heavily with emotions, and at the same time simply solving the problem of where and how to get rid of the ever-growing amount of dead bodies…
Inspired by these insights, we developed an extended, altered type of score, a reflection and speculation on human and more-than-human experiences. We explored the complex relationship between people and the graveyard as a public space, aiming to expand the way we think about these places and their multifaceted roles in society. This work sought to challenge traditional boundaries, encouraging a deeper engagement with the graveyard as a living part of the urban fabric, inviting people to listen attentively to it, feel it, look at it, and simply be in it.
Does the future have room for the dead?
As cities become more densely populated, the collective spaces that once offered respite and solace in the midst of the hectic pace of city life are being rationalized away. This process is often driven by political and economic motivations rooted in urban development, privatization, and the desire to maximize land value. In cities where space is limited, public areas are being transformed into commercially viable properties, with parks, open spaces, and communal areas being reduced or repurposed to make way for housing, office buildings, or retail spaces. Will this also be the case for the graveyards? Will our future have room for the dead?
Time and memory in the urban landscape
Begravningsplatsavvikelsen – Ett manus för kontextuell och platsspecifik analys, the theatre manuscript we wrote, unfolds across three Nordic capitals, where a writer, an architect, and a composer come together to explore a Swedish city through digital maps. As they engage in a dialogue about their creative processes, blurring the boundaries between art, death, process, time management, architecture, and sound, their conversation takes an unexpected turn. What begins as a discussion on a conceptual score during a video meeting, evolves into a walk through a graveyard in Malmö, narrated by three spectral figures: a vampire, a ghost, and a zombie. These figures, representing different facets of death and memory, guide the narrative as the city’s landscape reveals itself as a living entity, one inhabited not only by the living but also by a multitude of creatures, past and present.
In the manuscript, the graveyard emerges as a place where time, memory, and the city’s hidden histories converge. This liminal space offers a way to consider how the city, often viewed as a site of modern life and progress, is also a site of death, absence, and the supernatural. In the final act, the scene shifts to a gallery space, where a visitor enters an exhibition on scores and public space. Here, the sound journey takes over, immersing the visitor in a multi-sensory experience that bridges the realms of the living, the dead, and the imagined, inviting them to reconsider the city as both a place of everyday life and an archive of forgotten stories.
Dealing with the dead
The sound walk The Graveyard Digression begins by situating the listener’s body and mind outside the gallery space, taking them on a journey that starts in the city itself. Through a blend of architectural history and analysis, the listener is guided on a short walk through the neighborhood, one that unravels the socially stigmatized history of the area, all while reflecting on the surrounding architecture. As the listener moves through the streets, the narrative unfolds, offering insights into the past, the space, and its evolving social context.
This sonically guided walk leads toward the gates of the nearby graveyard, where the boundary between the urban and the sacred becomes increasingly apparent. The architectural reflections, essayistic ponderings and poetic listening exercises connects the past to the present, placing the listener in the complex intersection between space, memories and coexistence The graveyard becomes not only a destination, but also a focal point for contemplation on the intertwinings of urbanity and spirituality we might tend to overlook. The journey through the neighborhood and into the graveyard is as much about the physical space as it is about engaging with the histories, stories, and relationships that have shaped it. Once inside the graveyard, the listener is immersed in a multitude of stories, real, speculative, and imagined. This extended sonic journey leads them into a crematorium in Norway, where the sounds of casket cold storage coolers, crematorium oven fire, sifting through ashy remains, the grinding of burnt skeletal parts echo through the modern death industrial facility. These sounds are heard while standing in the somewhat serene surroundings of the grassy graveyard, perhaps under one of the towering trees, creating a surreal and profound experience. We were fortunate to gain access to the crematorium, allowing us to take field recordings for several hours while preparations and cremations were taking place. Reflecting on the use of these sounds in our work, we found that the depth they added to the experience far outweighed any unease that might arise from knowing the source of the sounds.
Other recordings were of graveyards in Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, of horses in police stables and open-to-visit farms, of bricks ground together and gravel shuffling, accompanied by electronic music, ominous synth-scapes, grungy artificial textures and ambient drones, all produced specifically for the different parts of the sound walk.
On life, death and public space
The listener, guided by a geolocalization app, can move at their own pace, choosing when to pause, perhaps on a bench along one of the gravelled paths. Moving in and out of the sound piece, allowing for personal engagement with the space. As they walk and listen, the narrative and soundscapes encourage them to reflect on the significance of the space they occupy. The gravestones, each marked with names, remind the listener of the many who have come before, connecting them to the city’s and the place’s layered history. The narrative woven into the sound piece is a blend of micro-essays, soundscapes, poems, and factual information, inviting the listener to consider the complexity of the graveyard as both a physical and emotional landscape. A space slowly shaped and changed according to our shared society’s philosophies, politics and way of dealing with practicalities.
Through this sonic experience, we aim to nurture a deeper awareness of the graveyard as a living public space within the urban environment, a place where sound, memory, future and history converge, inviting reflection on life, death, and the spaces in between.
The PUBLIC RETREAT project manifests itself in several different ways, most recent and current work are artistic research within the framework of the Platform Deep Dive (SE) project with sonic workshops and listening events, a solo exhibition with a spatial sound installation as part of the Färgfabriken Architecture Triennale (SE) and a radio residency at radiOrakel (NO) doing 12 experimental sound pieces for radio.
Earlier works are, among others, an immersive sound-, text-, and radio based solo exhibition in Helsinki (FI) at Gallery Oksasenkatu 11. Future work includes a publication release at Färgfabriken and Platform Stockholm along with an exhibition at Platform Stockholm, participation and contribution to a symposium on the theme of sound and listening culture in a collaboration with Sound Art Lab and Struer Museum (DK) and soundwork on Radio Sydväst with support from the platform Of Public Interest (OPI) in Stockholm (SE).
Bitsch Pedersen, Sjaastad Huse and Fager began their collaboration in 2022 with the art and architect project NYA LÖVHOLMEN which included semi-utopian architectural plans for an entire new neighborhood officially submitted as a citizen proposal; an absurd elevator pitch for an inverted skyscraper – a subterranean earth scraper – that could house all of mankind; handsewn site specific and locally distributed magazines; a sound archive; and a radio show about city planning, voiced in part by an enthusiastic bird.
NYA LÖVHOLMEN was nominated for the Architects Sweden’s 2023 Critics Award.
The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2024 will be announced around the start of 2025.
