A Quilt of Care and Music

We all know the simple act of care involved in placing a blanket around another person. In the installation A Room to Wait In, this gesture is made literal through textiles and song, both carrying a history spanning centuries. Nan Na Hvass has quilted together 150-year-old fabrics with her own emotional experiences and contemporary encounters with waiting rooms during fertility treatment. Her aim is to transform the clinical space in which one wakes after a procedure, drowsy and clinging to a fragile hope, into a more nurturing environment that stitches generations together. And to bring music into the experience. Each quilt bears witness to the bodies it has warmed and the hands that have sewn it.

Soprano and multidisciplinary artist Katinka Fogh Vindelev moved among us as we lay on individual beds, each covered with a quilted bedspread. »This pain is not yours alone,« came the words in her beautiful, deeply intimate voice, set to music by Hildegard von Bingen, the Italian composer Barbara Strozzi and Vindelev herself. Melancholic minor scales descended; elsewhere, small melodies emerged from an earlier musical era, without leading tones – that is, without the sense of causality found in virtually all music since the eighteenth century. Sounds that simply exist, without control or any necessary direction – much like a person living with a fragile hope of fertility.

There were only four places available – an intimate concert in every sense, in which care, expressed through song, textiles and presence, merged in an almost magical way. The person lying on the bed next to me could not stop crying afterwards. The room was anything but clinical – song and textiles had transformed it into a place of care. Thoughtful and beautiful.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek