A Phenomenology of Grief

Lau Andersson

 

The material for the piece is a collection of sounds recorded in the presence of death, decay, and absence. By listening to what is no more, one hears the wealth of sounds that never ceases, the endless continuation of life: At a funeral, one hears the fragile breaths of those present; in the forest, a dead animal is surrounded by the sound of the wind, birds singing, and the ocean in the distance. To hear what is no more, one must listen through the endless continuum of sounds and find in them not only their signification of the present but also their testimony of what has been and what is to come. By listening with your grief, sounds can undergo a transformation from being signifiers of objects to a symbolic manifestation of that which is no more.