I am sitting in a comfortable chair, wearing headphones and looking out the window,
where people outside are going about their everyday lives: talking, laughing, and even
touching each other in a casual everyday way. There is a strange conflict between
seeing and hearing. Somewhere between the two emerges a feeling of violence and
danger. Privacy, loneliness, distress. A story. A train. A brick crashes through a window.
There is so much sound. The sound is full. Overflowing. I have no room to breathe.
Where are my thoughts? Here they are. I long. I long for silence.
A jumble of different sounds makes me long for silence. I long for the sea. The swell of
the waves. The forest. A Finnish forest. A narrow cottage path where the silence at first
feels oppressive, as if one has been sealed inside a capsule. Until suddenly you realize
that it is not oppression at all. It is simply silence, free from noise pollution.
And then you begin to hear. You hear nature. Even the sound of a mosquito.
Sounds from the headphones: Nervous movement. Running. Breathlessness. Even the
flies seem aggressive.
Brain noise. Exhaustion. Sleepless nights. Worry.
"You know how bad that makes me feel." The sentence repeats. "You know how bad
that makes me feel." Again and again, then again a gong.
Sounds repeat themselves. Is the familiar somehow safer? The familiar train. The
familiar movement. The familiar chatter. I long for music, something calming, a
beautiful melody.
"Is it possible to be in someone else's head?"
"The human mind is never silent."
In the installation I seem to be less interested in sound itself than in repetition.
Thoughts repeat. Sounds repeat. Memories repeat. Perhaps this is how the mind works:
not as a stream but as a loop.
Now I recognize lip-smacking, someone is brushing their teeth. I hate the sound of lipsmacking, especially when someone is eating yogurt. What makes a sound disturbing?
Is there always a memory attached to it? In a way, everyday sounds are comforting. The
ordinary sounds of a life that is functioning. Perhaps that is why they are comforting.
They are not the sounds one imagines when everything is falling apart.
Sound of clock ticking. Yet everyday sounds can also be depressing. They remind me of
the clock at my grandmother's house when I was bored and time refused to move. The
world slipping away unused.
Nature is a master of repetition too. Birds repeat the same melodies over and over. Why
is that not considered nagging? That wagtail over there is repeating itself again.
"I want. Sweet. Smart. Wise. That's smart."
The installation offers possibility to get into someone else's head. Such a frightening
thought. As frightening as if pets suddenly started talking and commenting on your life.
"Oh my, you look so tired today. Do something about yourself."
The sounds from headphones begin to fade. "Sometimes I hear myself saying..."
"Sometimes I hear myself saying..." "Love of my life..."
This reminds me another artwork. Another attempt to capture the noise inside a human
head. My colleague in Finland, Janne Saarakkala, has a solo performance Talking Head
in which he speaks aloud everything that comes to mind for an hour. He verbalizes what
he sees, remembers, feels, and experiences without planning anything in advance. Like
Laurie Anderson's work, the piece attempts to capture the contents of a living mind.
The human mind is never silent. This thought stays with me as I enter the next installa7on: a
dark room where a folk song plays, and at the back of the space a screen shows people
posing like a postcard in a beau7ful landscape. The song repeats the same lines over and
over:
"Stop all this longing. Learn to live without love." "Love is not good for you."
The result is both comic and unsettling. It feels like a critique of a society in which
countless songs, films, and stories revolve around romantic love, the need for love, and
the longing for love. And yet it also feels like a refreshing slap in the face.
“Love is not good for you.”
Well, yes.
If we are talking about romantic love, it is certainly the source of countless difficulties.
Of course, love has many other forms as well.
The mantra continues.
The picturesque video repeats its message until it enters your veins. At some point I
begin to understand how religious mantras work. Repetition and repetition. Eventually
you find yourself repeating the words too, without knowing why. There is humor in it. It is
somewhere in between these folk-clothes, seriousness and set up of a postcard image
and bringing it to life.
The previous installation by Ragnar Kjartansson the Visitors (2020) that I saw at
Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, worked with repetition too, but in a
completely different way. Individual performers appeared separately (separate
screens), playing, humming, and singing fragments of a melody. Gradually they left their
isolated spaces and appeared together on the veranda of a country house. At the same
moment, the audience in the museum also gathered together.
By the end of the work, performers and audience alike had become a temporary
community, united by a melody. The final image showed the performers disappearing
into the meadow behind the house. It is an experience I have never forgotten.
Compared to that work, this installation feels static. The mantra repeats, but it does not
gather people together. It remains inside the individual listener, circulating through the
mind.
And still the song insists:
“Love is not good for you.
You must learn to live without love.”
Well, I don't want to.