EN BY I RUSLAND (A Town in Russia)

Sound installation made for Struer Tracks sound art festival in Denmark @ 2019

Most people in Denmark have heard the saying "Det er en by i Rusland" (“It’s a town in Russia”); This sentence is a metaphor for something entirely foreign or perplexing. But what precisely is this town we are referring to? In reality might such a town exist, and what makes it, “a town in Russia”? En By i Rusland  is a sound work consisting of audio recordings from eight different locations within a real town in Russia. The installation takes the form of “listening posts” positioned around the Danish town Struer, located a places equivalent to the places where the recordings were originally captured: The sounds of a train station made in from a real town somewhere in Russia will play back at the railway station in the Danish town called Struer. By listening to En By i Rusland we borrow a stranger’s ears and hear fragments of the familiar. We piece together the sounds of a town – and by way of listening – we help to dissolve an alienation of the unknown entity. En By i Rusland at once becomes an actual place on a short visit to Struer.