Start Again The Lament

I helped artist Taryn Simon realizing her large scale sound installation.

“In a relentless replay, the lamentations of professional mourners are broadcast into the reverberating space of Cisternerne. These sonic rituals of grief include northern Albanian laments, which seek to excavate ‘uncried words’; Wayuu laments, which safeguard the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek Epirotic laments, which bind the story of a life with its afterlife; and Yazidi laments, which trace a topography of displacement and exile. Cisternerne becomes an instrument echoing recitations of loss with a reverberation of 17 seconds.

As sound and visiting bodies move through repeating archways, the installation merges darkness and light, absence and presence, singular loss, and its exponential multiplication. The public is pulled through Cisternerne by lamentations sonically pushing against its walls in cacophony and silence.”