Maria W Horn - Panoptikon

A Closer Listen

Imagine a world in which not only abortion, but miscarriage are punishable by death; a world in which those who do not confess are condemned to unending torture until they do; a world in which prisoners are completely isolated for the first three years of their incarceration.  Unfortunately, it’s not hard to imagine such a world, because until recent years one existed in the Vita Duvan panopticon prison (White Dove Prison) in Luleå, Sweden. Even though it was closed in 1979, the chilling public discourse of 2024 leaves the door open for its return.  And as the recent death of Alexei Navalny and the death penalty for LGBTQI+ citizens in Uganda proves, eliminating such practices in one place does not mean they are discontinued in another.

Maria W Horn‘s Panoptikon began as an installation in the deserted prison “as a multichannel sound and light installation where the imagined individual voices of the inmates were represented by loudspeakers placed in the various cells of the prison.”  Horn’s compositions for organ and voice are meant to imitate the effects of solitary confinement, time distortion and constant surveillance on the individual soul.  The music is plaintive, yearning, heartrending; but whenever the voices intertwine, hope bursts the boundaries of despair.

The opening is awash in whispers, like droplets falling from a cavern ceiling.  As the prisoners begin to sing, the whispers turn into prayers, the song into chant, making the experience seem holy, recalling the sounds of a monastery or convent.  In such settings, people purposely embrace isolation, intoning the liturgy of the hours; in solitary confinement, such markers are absent.  Can one face torture and death with beautiful supplication?  Horn suggests that some spirits remain unbroken.  But whenever the voices vanish, leaving behind the organ drones, their withdrawal creates a chasm of loneliness.  An instrument meant to inspire transcendent thoughts instead implies emptiness and desertion.  The title track, devoid of voices, leaves the mind to its own devices.  The closing folk song offers a hint of healing.  For the broken and dead, it is too late.

The album is a testimony to a greater crime than the charges brought against the prisoners.  The warning is that it could happen, and is happening, again and still.  (Richard Allen)