Wergelandsparken, Kristiansand · Norway

A park in the middle of Kristiansand, and yet strangely anonymous. Misfits, addicts, tourists, people passing through. They don’t know each other. They don’t look, don’t stop, don’t speak.

I call this podwalk a sound shower. I invite people into the park, meet them there, and show them Echoes — the app that carries the piece — and how to install it. Then they walk. Alone, with headphones, each person becomes the only listener in a park full of strangers. Afterwards we meet again, and they tell me what they heard.

That is the paradox the work is built on: a shared emptiness answered by an intimate, solitary address. Eight authors have each written a text to a you — a letter to a stranger the reader will never meet. Each of them left me a reading on my answering machine, a voice speaking into a room no one was in. I kept those recordings, and they became the piece. The walk lays out eight echoes across the park, but nothing is given in a fixed order. Beneath the eight texts lie four hours of improvised music, cut into 28 tracks. As the listener moves and searches for the texts, their steps trigger the tracks — so each person composes their own version of the piece, a score no one else will ever hear the same way.

I want to hold them in the park as long as I can. I want to activate the park — not with noise, but with attention: to make strangers, for a while, look at the same place with new ears and new eyes.