What is the Work / What is the World

There is something strange in the ancient woodlands of Jeløya island. Were it not for the little orange sign staked into the ground, you might almost not notice it, so subtle is “The Grey Zone (NeverWhere),” an installation by Jacob Kirkegaard for this year’s edition of the Momentum Biennale in Norway. The loudspeakers are carefully concealed. The sound is mixed low enough that it sinks into the ambient sounds of the forest. But even if you’re not consciously aware of it, I think you would feel it somehow. In among the rustle of wind through birch leaves, the twittering of wrens, treecreepers and chaffinches, you can make out a series of resonant plinks, plops and silvery crashes suggesting a harsh reverberant interior. The piece suggests an uncanny confusion of interior and exterior spaces. Recorded by Kirkegaard on a trip to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in October 2005, the sound is coming from the Azure swimming pool in the abandoned Ukrainian city of Pripyat, a place where no swimmer ever dives but liquid drips from the ceiling, summoning for Kirkegaard the image of indoor rainfall in the beguiling final scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris” (1972). 

The recordings Kirkegaard made at Chernobyl were previously used in the video work “AION” (2006). Inspired by Alvin Lucier’s “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Kirkegaard chose four separate spaces within the Exclusion Zone, recorded the sound there, then played it back in the same space, re-recording it in combination with the background ambience again and again—up to ten times—until the resonant frequencies of the room took over, engulfing the entire sonic field. That work was exhibited in the landmark show “Soundings” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, curated by Barbara London in 2013. Here in Norway, some of those radioactive recordings find a new (half-)life. They are no longer accompanied by video in the safe confines of the gallery; they’re now out in the wild. “When you go out there, you see civilization crumbling,” Kirkegaard told me. “But in the nature areas of the Zone, you could say that nothing looks really wrong. But you know it is there. That changed my whole concept of nature.”

Born in Esbjerg, on the west coast of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula, Kirkegaard has made a career out of placing his microphones where most would fear to tread. He has recorded cremations and autopsies, volcanic vibrations and melting glaciers, the sounds of war, disease, and massed human waste, and some of the world’s most contested—not to say, most highly militarized—border walls. But he is no documentarian. Kirkegaard’s work is carefully formed and often highly composed, adept at drawing from his chosen subjects their hidden tones and textures, their rich inner music. He has collaborated with brass bands, filmmakers, and composers like Else Marie Pade and Philip Jeck, releasing  dozens of albums on labels such as Important Records, Posh Isolation, Topos and Touch. Recently he has been working on a longterm project to document and make public the archival history of David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Billy Klüver’s “Experiments in Art and Technology” project with E.A.T. director Julie Martin. We met at Galleri F15 in Moss, near the southern tip of Jeløya Island in Norway, to discuss composing with guns, why an autopsy is like a symphony, and the importance of being morbid.