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The silo rises high above the houses of the former ship owners like a solid and windowless castle, a familiar landmark, as you approach Bergkvara from the bay. The building has been defunct and empty for several years, like the harbour that was once one of the greatest in the country.

The years 1867 – 1870 were hard in this area. Several years of crop failure had rendered the barns empty. The bread was baked with bark or chaff. People wandered along the roads and frozen lakes begging. Famine hit the small cottages first, but as time went by, it even hit the more wealthy farms. Many succumbed to the harsh winters. Those who had both the strength and good fortune emigrated. Those who remained were forced to build up their livelihood again, slowly. An ancestor’s school photograph, from about 1875, awakened the insight of destitution that had followed in the trail of the crop failure. The children in the photograph were marred by malnutrition, causing their hands and heads to be disproportionate to their emaciated torsos. Their features were prematurely aged.
In spite of the coarse concrete walls, the high silo towers convey a sacred atmosphere, of that of a monument or cathedral, representing safety, nourishment and welfare.

A grain silo, raw but even a bit sacred, a cathedral representing safety, nourishment and welfare. I had it opened for a couple of weeks as a memorial for some of those whose faces caught and touched me but whose names and fates I knew nothing about.

The visitors entered through a lit passage into a small corridor containing entrances on both sides to the approximately 30 meter high towers. From inside of the silo tower the children gazed down, projected directly on the raw and rough concrete wall. They floated, two and two, tightly together, above them compact darkness, acoustics. The sound of meditative, mechanic music accompanied by distant voices reminiscent of the murmur of children playing on a beach ascended from a tunnel below the wooden floor of the corridor. The sound then merged together with the sound of the visitor’s steps and whispers.

Echoes! Echoes of feet on wooden floors! Echoes of feet that walked in the past, of those who walked in the past and on into the history of anonymity.

The sound for the piece was designed by FLOW, Martin Dümmatzen.