Jacob Kirkegaard, Danish Sound Artist: The Sound of Waste

The Association of Jersey Architects sponsored by Normans Builders Merchants has announced Jacob Kirkegaard, a Danish Sound Artist is visiting Jersey to give a talk about his project The Sound of Waste.

This event will take place in the Jersey Museum Lecture Theatre, Weighbridge Place, St Helier.

Jacob Kirkegaard is both a visual artist and a composer who works with recordings of sounds that we rarely hear in our daily lives, taken from spaces loaded with meaning and tied to the conversations about our world today.

In his film Testimonium (2019) he presents a video and sound installation, where you can get really close to and listen to waste. He records the sounds by burying vibration sensors in the piles of waste at a dumping site in Kenya and lowers a hydrophone into pools of wastewater from a processing plant in Denmark. The listener is immersed in very detailed and rich recordings of waste. You really hear the metal, the plastic, and the glass moving in the polluted water.

Jacob Kirkegaard. said: “…. When I was 17, I worked for the summer as an assistant to archaeologists who were excavating a graveyard. I was very interested in what they found in the earth: pearls and all kinds of beautiful old things. I wondered what people in the future would find from our generation. It probably won’t be gold or ceramics. It’s going to be plastics and radioactive material. Our waste is a testimonium of our time….”

A pay-bar for ordering drinks will be available from 5:45pm in Jersey Museum Foyer with the talk starting at 6:15pm in the Lecture Theatre, followed by a Q&A session.