SINGING TO THE DEAD
Essay – Audio Walk – Choir
Den här texten är bara tillgänglig på engelska.
Through three parts – an essay, an audio walk, and a choral performance – SINGING TO THE DEAD explores the connection between transracial/cultural adoption and the story of a whale calf that was killed in 1865, taxidermied, and placed in the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg.
The death of nature as the rebirth of Man is the overarching Western narrative of separation that has long informed my artistic practice. This separation is described as a forgotten loss humanity still suffers from.
As an adoptee, I too don’t know what I’ve forgotten—only that there is a separation, a loss.
In my essay “BECOMING UNSETTLED: TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION AND THE 1865 ASKIM WHALE CALF” I center adoption and the whale calf within this narrative—as two unique historical events shaped by forced, man-made transformations under colonial and patriarchal power.
In collaboration with the Museum, the project included an April audio walk where I sang and spoke to the whale calf as a meditation on grief and lullaby, culminating in a collective ritual: a choral requiem on Walpurgis Night (April 30) performed by an adoptee choir singing two original songs, The Lake and No Gods.
A requiem honors the dead and offers them rest. The killed whale calf—his mouth opened on Valborg, silent yet drawing us to sing—embodies the deep connection between adoption and death, reflected in adoptees’ high suicide rates and the colonial practice of relocating children from the Global South to the Global North. These structures bind us and singing together reflects this connection. Singing is also central to my work as it can access unconscious memories tied to adoption trauma, dismissed in Sweden
Audio walk audio, Audio walk original script, Audio walk swedish translation,
@sanktmarie
singingtothedead.cargo.site
