LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND
PARA:DOX

A video compilation by Jacob Kirkegaard focusing on the voices and real-life stories of waste reclaimers
highlighting their journeys, challenges and aspirations.
All films were made by Jacob Kirkegaard and produced by UN-Habitat, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and The Circulate Initiative. South Africa, Nigeria, Vietnam and India, 2023. The videos were premiered by UN-Habitat in Kenya in November 2023 for an event focused on the voices of waste reclaimers. It was co-hosted by The Circulate Initiative and UN-Habitat in Nairobi during the third session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3) to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.

PERMANENT CLOUD
MORI ART MUSEUM, Tokyo, Japan,
April - September 2023

Permanent Cloud by Jacob Kirkegaard is a new sound and visual installation created especially for Mori Art Museum.
The work captures the sound of humanity's rapidly growing digital memory stored in the mechanical heart of the Cloud.

Jacob Kirkegaard made audio recordings at a massive data center in Germany with sensors placed directly on different parts of its servers.
These sounds of the mechanical Cloud are combined with video footage he shot of natural clouds.
Permanent Cloud will be installed in a darkened room on the 53rd floor of the Mori Tower. The sound recordings of the Cloud play through four speakers located in the corners of the room. Video recordings of clouds are projected through three parallel semi-transparent hanging projection screens onto the large floor-to-ceiling window at the other end of the room, which is covered by a darkening film. Through this last projection surface can be seen the real clouds and the Tokyo skyline beyond that become integral parts of the work.

Mori Art Museum 20th Anniversary Exhibition: World Classroom, Tokyo, Japan. April 19 - September 24, 2023

THE LAND

Jacob Kirkegaard's new composition on the sounds of agriculture. With the use of vibration sensors and near-field measurement microphones THE LAND (2022) reveals the mechanically pulsating energy of food production

THE LAND (LANDET in Danish) is a pulsating and immersive work composed from sound- and vibration recordings of the mechanical aspects of Danish agriculture. Recorded on a pig- cattle- and a chicken farm, as well as at the ‘Danish Crown' pig slaughter house, detailed sensor recordings of the vibrating, roaring machinery of agriculture invites the listener out to the land and into an incessant, almost hypnotizing universe of sound; a condition that the endless pulse of the food industry generates.

WORLD PREMIERE at ((o)) Gong Tomorrow Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark, Nov 10, 2022

With support from KODA Culture, Danish Composer's Society and the Danish Arts Foundation

KRYDS ILD / CROSSFIRE

The Danish composer and sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard has taken weapons and war as the subjects of his latest work, KRYDS ILD (2022), whose world premiere will be performed by the Royal Lifeguard’s Music Corps

Jacob Kirkegaard’s original work CROSSFIRE (2022) was created from sound recordings of firearms and artillery. The work was transcribed for orchestra and entitled KRYDS ILD (2022). The work evokes the sounds of a war situation. More than just a collection of sounds, Kirkegaard interviewed a war veteran who spent time under fire, talking with him about the human sound of war, the endless, unbearable wait and then the sudden, deafening crossfire. From this conversation Kirkegaard was able to approach question that shaped this work: What does war sound like?
 
Kirkegaard has sought the answer to this question through a year of audio research including several visits to the Danish military shooting ranges, as well as to shooting ranges with civilian weapons’ enthusiasts. He has made sound recordings with sensitive vibration sensors placed directly on firearms and military vehicles as well as with acoustic measuring microphones positioned in shooting ranges. Jacob Kirkegaard has listened attentively to the mechanics of the weapon, the cutting of the projectile through the air and the deep echo after the explosion of a grenade. He used his recordings to compose a work that was then transcribed especially for The Royal Lifeguard’s Music Corps: 



The work is orchestrated by Connor McLean and published by Edition·S. CROSSFIRE is commissioned by KLANG Festival.
World Premiere: Friday 2 September 2022, Stærekassen, Copenhagen. 

With support from KODA Culture, Danish Composer's Society and the Danish Arts Foundation

TESTIMONIUM - ATHENS

New work based on sound, vibration and video recordings of dumping sites and waste management facilities in Athens
Commissioned by ONASSIS CULTURE CENTER and Borderline Festival, Greece, May - June 2021

MEMBRANE

Membrane (2020) is a sound and visual portrait of the growing border wall that separates Mexico and the U.S. This long metal barrier takes many forms and is made of many different materials, as it winds and twists several thousand kilometers through deserts, plains, and mountains, crossing Native American land, national parks, and even city streets to end in the Pacific Ocean.
 
Kirkegaard travelled along the wall from El Paso to Tijuana, stopping at sites on both sides of the wall to shoot video and to record ambient sounds of the surrounding landscape a well as the inner sounds of the metal structure: By attaching vibration sensors directly to the wall at each site, he captured the resonant frequencies of the different wall structures.
 
Membrane, with its panoramic vistas and penetrating close up views of the wall, reveals that this seemingly desolate and silent area of the American Southwest is alive with light and shadow, and especially with sound, the sound of the wall itself.

Solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery, New York, USA (Februrary 27 - March 27, 2021) For the first time, Testimonium is presented in its most complete form: the video installation will be presented with
the 8-channel sound sculpture, and alongside Kirkegaard’s photographs of the desolate industrial landscapes.

THE WIRE - TESTIMONIUM at Fridman Gallery, New York, USA, UK, April 2021
BOMB MAGAZINE - Listening to the Heart: Jacob Kirkegaard Interviewed by Julie Martin, USA, March 2021
FLASH ART - Decaying Sound, Sounding Decay: Jacob Kirkegaard, USA, March 2021

August 25th, 2020: ANNOUNCEMENT
Jacob Kirkegaard's new work MEMBRANE
has been acquired by ARoS Art Museum, Denmark

MEMBRANE is part of the exhibition Far From Home at ARoS Art Museum, Aarhus (Until Nov 28, 2021)

OPUS MORS

Opus Mors is four listening spaces for one of the existential and natural aspects of being alive.

The project portrays four sound environments that the human body commonly will be surrounded by or exposed to in the immediate post mortem: a morgue, an autopsy, a cremation and the decomposition - events that no one will ever get to sense on their own bodies because of the very fact of death. Opus Mors is an immersive, intimate and powerfully detailed sonic meditation into these four significant death spaces.

OPUS MORTURARIUM
Two ambient recordings made inside two morgues listens within the slow and deep tones from the facilities that keep the corpses cold.

OPUS AUTOPSIA
Detailed and precise near-field sound recordings of a full autopsy starting with opening the corpse, following the removal and slicing and cutting open all the organs and brain, to finally returning all the organs, closing and washing the corpse. This work comes with a detailed 'track list' that provides insight into the timbre of the unique human organs.

OPUS CREMATIO
Coffin being rolled into the oven, the oven's different burning stages, the removal and relocation of the ashes to the ash cooler and then to the bone crusher. Finally, the ashes being poured into the urn. Vibration sensors placed on the surfaces of the oven reveals the sound environment of the oven as if heard from the inside.

OPUS PUTESCO
Sound recordings made at a forensic study facility where donated corpses are placed in an enclosed nature area to decompose while being studied. This work was made from near-field sound recordings of decomposing corpses recorded with measurement microphones placed only 1 cm above- as well as with vibration sensors placed inside the corpses.

TESTIMONIUM

In 2023 the United Nations Human Settlement Programme / UN-HABITAT in Nairobi, Kenya is continuing their collaboration Jacob Kirkegaard who develops on his TESTIMONIUM project with new works created from sound of waste and with interviews with waste pickers for WASTE WISE CITIES creating awareness of plastic waste.

In 2018 Jacob Kirkegaard embarked on a project  to record the sonic timbres of the world's trash, wastewater and other discarded matter, that proved to be a haunting, surprising and shockingly beautiful journey. He made recordings of waste in Denmark, Latvia, Estonia, Greenland, Kenya, Greece and Ethiopia.  While in Kenya, he visited and recorded the Dandora dumping site, one of the world’s biggest waste dumps. In addition to recording the sound of various waste dumps, Jacob Kirkegaard interviewed some of the waste pickers about their lives and dreams for the future. The interviews were initiated and made with UN-HABITAT's Nao Takeuchi who is Kirkegaard’s close colleague on this project.
The work that Jacob Kirkegaard created from these recordings, TESTIMONIUM, was first shown in 2019 at the Fridman Gallery in New York. The interviews were also part of a conference and exhibition about waste held at the UN compound in Nairobi which both included the TESTIMONIUM sound installation and also facilitated a direct dialogue between the waste pickers (who were invited to the UN) and the UN-HABITAT personell. 

TESTMONIUM has become an ongoing project that uses the sounds and vibrations of waste. This year the United Nations Human Settlement Programme / UN-HABITAT in Nairobi, Kenya has commissioned and hired Jacob Kirkegaard to develop this project further and to create new sound works and interviews as part of WASTE WISE CITIES project that aims to creating global awareness of plastic waste.
READ The Wire Magazine’s review of Testimonium at Fridman Gallery, New York, USA

Jacob Kirkegaard is participating with two concerts at this year's Maerz Musik, Berliner Festspiele

CHAOS EDGE

Chaos Edge (2022) uses two different recordings of butterflies. The first part of the work presents the stable but increasing tremble recorded from the tip of two wings on a butterfly poised for flight. The second, the unpredictable movement of the wings of a tethered butterfly in full flight mode.
Using these sounds from the butterfly, Chaos Edge seeks to sonify the “butterfly effect”: both the classic poetic metaphor that illustrates chaos theory, in which a small change in a system has a large influence in shaping its evolution, and the more recent quantum mechanical analogue, where the butterfly effect is thwarted by preparing a particle in a specific quantum state which is taken back in time and modified without changing its nature in the present.

This year, 2022 Danish Cultural Institute celebrates the 100 years of Danish physicist Niels Bohr being awarded the Nobel Prize. They do this with 3 different sound installations by Anna Kirse, Tie Yann and myself interpreting the work of Niels Bohr. They will be co-exhibiting at 3 different locations in 3 different countries opening at the Culture Night in Copenhagen on October 14th and at Niels Bohr Institute, Universitetsparken 5, where many other Science Campus events will also take place. After the opening the exhibition will move to H.C. Ørsted Instituttet where it will stay open to the public for another month and then to Riga (15th of October, 22) and Beijing (11th of December). The exhibition is made in collaboration with Visionary Culture Foundation and supported by Danish Ministry of Culture (SLKS), Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, William Demant Fonden, Knud Højgaard Fond, Danish Composers Association Koda Kultur (Dansk Komponistforening), Danish Art Foundation (Statens Kunstfond), Latvian State Capital Foundation.

The video was recorded at the Botanical Garden by Frederik Wolff in Museum of Natural History in Copenhagen.

Jacob Kirkegaard / LOUISIANA CHANNEL
When I listen, I have to be quiet
September 2021

MELLEM  RUM

Solo exhibition at Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark, April 21 - Septembver 19, 2021 Works: OPUS MORS, MEMBRANE, MELT and a new work ANIMAL. MELT at the exhibition MELLEM RUM at Tønder Art Museum, Denmark, March 2021

SOME SAY THE WORLD WILL END IN FIRE

New work for In Focus: Statements at Copenhagen Contemporary
Opening on June 25th, 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.

TESTIMONIUM

TESTIMONIUM is an audio-visual work created from recordings from waste, recycling and wastewater facilities
in Denmark and Latvia as well as from one of the world’s largest landfills; the Dandora dumpingsite in Nairobi, Kenya

Vibration sensors were placed inside piles of waste and on large incinerators. Underwater microphones were lowered underneath the surfaces of polluted rivers and large wastewater management basins. Acoustic microphones were pointed at bleak landscapes of burning plastic ignited by the wind. Like a testimonium from the past as if experienced from the future, these close-up recordings of human generated waste offers an intimate revisit into human discarded matter, their metamorphic journeys or absorbing endurance

Denmark: BIOFOS Denmark, Reiling Glasrecycling Denmark, STENA Recycling, ARGO, Vestforbraending. Latvia/Estonia: WasteArt project NOT out of sight NOT out of mind Campaign, IES, ZAAO Ltd (LV), MoKS (EE), Evelyn and John Grzinich. Kenya: Nao Takeuchi, Waste Management Unit, UN-Habitat, David Makori; Chief Environment Officer, Wambua Ndaka; Site Manager at Dandora Dumpsite, Nairobi City County and Mohamed; leader of waste pickers at Dandora Dumpsite, Nairobi