︎︎︎A Microscopic Burial

Audio Performance 27mins (2021)


In 2019 a funeral took place in Berlin for the recently discovered microscopic remains of 300 political prisoners executed by the Nazi’s during World War II. Taking outset in this event, the audio performance The Microscopic Burial examines how the work of mourning can be composed and redistributed as a collective act that bonds through shared affinities. In the performance, oral storytelling is employed as a multi-sited mnemonic device. Additionally, it draws upon field recordings of the funeral, historical audio archives, essayistic spoken word compositions and spatialized resonant audio to produce a gathering of sounds that continue the work of mourning. 


Film Still, Burial of microscopic remains, in Berlin graveyard, Sondin-Kung, Guston (2019)
Film Still, Berlin Reichshauptstadt [Berlin Imperial Capital], City streets in Berlin by unknown author (1938).

Surrounded by this sympathetic sonic resonance, the participants are taken on a journey from the past to the present, from the inside to the outside, from collective electrical impulses to the bodies that make them, from the embodied to the disembodied, from the human cell to the call of a bird, from a religious prayer to a field of political affinities, from the atmosphere of the everyday to how our bodies compensate for spatialized sonic vibrations.