Voices in the Shadows of Monuments.
2022

Presented at: Copenhagen Light Festival (2022), The Power of Mapping (2022), Going Public by C4 projects (2022), etc.

Created by: Barly Tshibanda (DRC), Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (DK) and Nanna Elvin Hansen (DK).

Participating artists and voices: Bernard Akoi-Jackson (GH), La Vaughn Belle (USVI), Oceana James (USVI), Jupiter J. Child (MZ/DK), Julie Edel Hardenberg (GL), Oceana James (USVI), Sirí Paulsen (GL/DK) and Sabitha Söderholm (IN/DK).

Narrator and kalimba: Jupiter J. Child (MZ/DK)

Sound design: Arash Pandi (IR/DK)

Visuals and illustrations: Barly Tshibanda (DRC)

Layout and website: Anders Gerning (DK)

Visit the Audiowalk website here.

Following the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, where monuments celebrating colonists were being toppled worldwide, in Denmark there was a general atmosphere that this was a history that only pertained to the British, the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, the US etc. and that Denmark was/is a benevolent colonizer. We became interested in exploring how colonialism is inscribed in the built environment and monuments in central Copenhagen. And once you stumble across it - it is everywhere. We invited the artists Bernard Akoi-Jackson, La Vaughn Belle, Jupiter J. Child, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Oceana James, Sirí Paulsen and Sabitha Söderholm to create site-specific voices and narratives for the different locations. Apart from initial conversations held with the artists, they all used different methods of performativity or storytelling that they are already working with in their artistic practice. Bringing all the pieces together, it was amazing to see how relationships started to emerge between the different voices. Copenhagen Light Festival provided the setting to experiment with light projections. For the inaugural tours, visuals designed by Barly Tshibanda were projected on the Layer Cake House and the equestrian statue of Christian V. 

Voices in the Shadows of Monuments is an audio walk that examines material traces from the colonial era embedded in buildings and monuments in the center of Copenhagen. The walk takes you from Christianshavns Torv to Kongens Nytorv, creating a polyphonic soundscape. The artists Jupiter J. Child (MZ/DK), La Vaughn Belle (USVI), Sirí Paulsen (GL/DK), Sabitha Söderholm (DK/IN), Oceana James (USVI), Julie Edel Hardenberg (GL) and Bernard Akoi-Jackson (GH) create narratives that intertwine different geographies and times: past and present interweave and testify to how colonialism is not a closed chapter, but still has strong reverberations in the present. You are invited to assemble the fragments that you encounter along the route into new narratives about the city.