Without Tears (2011) a site-specific installation, was realized during Kulturunatta in Mölndal in a former industrial water site where a river passes through an old factory building. Inspired by Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, the work features sculptural loudspeakers modeled on a gramophone horn, transmitting a recorded performance of Dido’s Lament. Water functions as both material condition and metaphor, framing sound as a medium of contact and transmission
This installation was realized in a former factory space where water passes directly through the building, entering and exiting through the stone walls. The work was conceptually informed by Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982), particularly its portrayal of impossible ambition, physical endurance, and the transport of cultural forms across hostile terrain.
Drawing on this reference, I developed the work Without Tears. Three white sculptural loudspeakers were placed close to the water, partially submerged within the damp interior space. Through these forms, the voice of my daughter, Nathalie, performing Dido’s Lament from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, could be heard resonating in the space.
I took the form from the old Gramophone-speaker seen in the movie.
The work stages the voice as a fragile yet persistent carrier of emotion, memory, and contact, transmitted through water, stone, and air. In this sense, water operates as a medium rather than a backdrop—linking voice, body, and architecture, and extending the sea as a metaphor for connection, transmission, and distance. The installation forms part of a broader investigation into how sound and material structures mediate contact across physical and emotional thresholds, a line of inquiry that later continues in Big Blu.