Symphony of a Missing Room

“In our work, bodily states, which are very different, become almost like a musician’s score.”
Martina Seitl

“Symphony of a Missing Room” investigates the phenomenology of memory, activating the most diverse layers of meaning and forms of seeing – all simultaneously. Removed from the visible and tangible world by opaque snow goggles and wireless headphones, the visitors move through the museum aided by a combination of audio instructions and touches by trained ‘guides’.

During the experience, we find ourselves freed from the physical limitations of time and space. Doing the unimaginable, you pass through walls, and down tunnels traveling through a network of past exhibitions and the museums that originally hosted “Symphony of a Missing Room”. Our perceptions are the single medium of the work: a closed system in which reality fundamentally originates from the perceiver as a form of projection.

Existing in parallel with the architecture and history of the host museum, “Symphony of a Missing Room” is something like a time machine, reminding of the Antikythera Mechanism, a 2000-year old machine that like “Symphony of a Missing Room” has absorbed its own past incarnations. And so the series of works develops a unique capacity to reflect back on itself, even capturing an inward gaze on itself – indeed a memory archive.

Time and evolution are the key experiences of this serial work, which first appeared at the Swedish National Museum in Stockholm in 2009. “Symphony of a Missing Room” has been hosted by ten internationally renowned museums and further on they have been commissioned to bring it to Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India and Centre Pompidou-Metz, France.

By Christer Lundahl & Martina Seitl
Assistant Director Rachel Alexander
Guides / Performers Bikash Chatterjee, Martin Heise, Laura Hemming-Lowe, Emma Waltraud Howes
Design of sightless goggles Jula Reindell