The Wayuu people, from the desert borderlands between Venezuela and Colombia, believe that we die twice. The first time is physical and the second is when the soul begins its journey to the land of the dead. The sound of laments by the Wayuu, which guides the soul’s way to the cosmos, can be heard as part of a new installation by the American artist Taryn Simon in an old reservoir beneath Copenhagen, inspired by the rituals of grief.

Simon is the most recent artist to take up residence in the Cisterns—a subterranean art space located beneath Søndermarken Park on Frederiksberg Hill, which hosts a site-specific installation each year. The drinking water reservoir was first established in the 1850s, but ceased in 1933 and lay forgotten for some years. It was only in 1996, when Copenhagen was the European Capital of Culture, that the Cisterns was reimagined as a radical art space. In 2001, the Cisterns became the Museum of Modern Glass Art, with two distinctive glass pyramids constructed at the surface level. Since 2013, the urban dripstone cave has seen projects by such artists as Jeppe Hein, Superflex, Tomás Saraceno, and Kimsooja. The cavernous halls pose unique challenges, with protruding stalagmites and stalactites, cool temperatures, and high humidity levels. Artists are forced to contend with this environment and harness its extraordinary atmosphere. This year, Simon has filled the Cisterns with a soundtrack of laments from different cultures—songs and poems of ancient oral traditions that are often performed as public rites of grief.

During the press view of her installation, Simon emerges from the gloom of the Cisterns into Søndermarken Park. She explains that she has been up most of the night putting the finishing touches to the show. Stepping down into the bowels of the Cisterns is like a descent into the underworld. One’s eyes take time to adjust to the darkness and absorb the pools of water that fill the three chambers. The sensation is much like the River Styx, with the constructed walkways the guiding ferryman who has been paid with the coin of our ticket entry. Simon tells STIR that she even considered making it darker. The walkways make a path through the shadowy Cisterns and as visitors explore they are bombarded by the sounds of mourning from around the world. The Wayuu laments are joined by those from northern Albania, the Yazidi exiled from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and Epirus in Greece. During some moments, the laments are indistinguishable and form a crescendo of voices which reverberate for 17 seconds in the caves to overwhelming effect. In between are moments of silence—voids where the dead are left to rest.

Simon began to explore rituals of grief with the work An Occupation of Loss—produced with the Park Avenue Armory and Artangel, and first performed in New York (2016) and then London (2018)—for which she collaborated with a group of international professional mourners. That work marked Simon’s first foray into performance but captured much of the same interests that had inspired her career so far, surrounding systems of control, categorisation, and power. Previous projects had included documenting wrongful convictions, mapping bloodlines, and recreating the flower displays that adorned signings of political agreements in history. In the same way, Simon argues a professional mourner can shape, broker, and inhabit grief.  Simon further developed her interest in the subject with the video work Laments from Quarantine (2020), when she asked some of her collaborators from An Occupation of Loss to perform for the camera.

In both of these past projects, the rituals of grief could be seen and heard, but in the Cisterns, the visual experience of the lament is stripped away. The only visible elements through the darkness are the carefully placed beams of light that guide our path and flicker in the water. We are instead surrounded by an intense soundtrack that physically envelops the body. The Cisterns themselves are effectively part of the installation, as the architecture impacts how sound bounces from the walls and echoes underground.

Of course, these laments are not an expression of actual grief—they are a performance. And yet, when actors cry, they often draw upon a real experience to conjure tears. There is a fine line in fact between make-believe and reality. Similarly, the wails of professional mourners cannot simply be seen as purely performative.

The theatrical distance of performed grief that Simon captured with An Occupation of Loss and Laments from Quarantine is transformed in the context of the Cisterns. Without the visual prompt or presence of the performers, the laments spark a profound experience that is at once universal and deeply personal. With only our sense of hearing to rely upon, we are arguably more vulnerable to the sounds of grief and willing to relate these to our histories. Our imagination cannot help but draw upon our own experience of death. Simon’s sound installation explores how we mourn individually and collectively, and yet in the darkness of the Cisterns, it is easy to feel quite alone.

The title, Start Again the Lament, speaks to the relentless rhythm of life and death, and the recycling of rituals. Whether Simon’s installation should be viewed as a re-enactment or a true expression of grief, the experience of the mourners’ cries is undeniably moving. Let the music begin and the curtain rises for the lament to start once again.