An avid explorer of sound’s spectral properties, Maria W Horn’s work realises the potential of long-forgotten spaces. Via instrumental textures, room responses, the human voice and a specialised computer language, she synthesises entirely new sonics. We heard more about her processes and the at-times chilling story behind her affecting new album, Panoptikon
Originally operational between 1856 and 1979, Sweden’s Vita Duvan prison, in Luleå, in the far north of Sweden, was the country’s only ‘panopticon prison’: an environment designed to facilitate maximum social control through psychological techniques, including isolation and limited human contact. It instilled an omnipresent feeling of being watched via its circular structure. For Swedish composer, artist and electronic innovator Maria WHorn, the prison – now abandoned – was an intriguing prospect.
Maria explains: “As I visited the city in order to research the area for The Arts Biennial, I passed by this circular building that I found fascinating. It turned out to be a former prison. The only ‘panoptic’ prison in Sweden. As I started working on an installation, the history of the prison gradually unfolded.”
Sonic projects of this type are nothing new for Maria: her 2021 work Dies Irae, for example, focuses on the acoustics and spectral properties of an abandoned machine hall. The Stockholmbased composer is a well known figurehead of the city’s experimental electronic scene, which was underlined by her co-founding of label XKatedral in 2015. Operating at the intersection between audio/visual art and working as a music artist, Maria’s latest project was spurred by a fascination with the lives of the people who were held at Vita Duvan. “In this work, I was trying to imagine the experience of the individual prisoner, whose first three years were often spent in total isolation, during which all contact with other prisoners was strictly forbidden. The silence and uncertainty, the scarce space whose only indication of the passage of time, is the cycles of daylight. How is consciousness affected by the kind of sensory deprivation that an isolation cell entails?
“One passage from the prison books that stuck with me was describing the church service held on Sundays, where the priest was located in the middle of the panopticon and prisoners were allowed to have their doors hatched slightly open, to hear but not see through the cell doors. In this way they could sing along with the hymns from inside their cells, and this is described as a very intense and vivid experience for the inmates, after months of isolation, to get to hear the voices of the other inmates and to share this communal singing experience. This was only allowed for a brief period in the prison’s history, as the management beli
