SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

Installation. An 8-channel (8x) 45-minute composition from recordings of whispering voices, looped; 8 speakers and haze. Work made for the Focus: Statements exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, 2020

New sound installation by Jacob Kirkegaard in which multiple voices whisper the over 100 names that different cultures have used to describe ice and snow in all its forms. The names are spoken in eight languages; Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, Russian and Swedish, and are distributed over eight speakers throughout a bunker next to the Copenhagen Contemporary building.

The omnipresent and steadily whispering recitals of such names as Dead Ice, Frost Smoke, Glacier Tongue, Old Ice, Rotten Ice, Sastrugi, Tide Crack and Whiteout in eight Nordic languages is a subtle but persistent statement and tribute - not only to an undeniably disappearing phenomenon in times of globally rising temperatures but - to a vocabulary of words melting away as well.

The title of the work is quoted from Robert Frost’s poem Fire and Ice from 1920 which imagines the end of the world. The names for ice and snow were collected from a Glossary of Snow and Ice published by the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1966.

Voices:
Anna Katrin Øssursdóttir Egilstrøð, Anna von Hausswolff, Inuk Silis Høegh, Tuomas A. Laitinen, Tine Surel Lange, Runar Magnusson, Uilu Pedersen, Katinka Fogh Vindelev and Katerina Zavolokina.