Music of the Spheres (still image), 2024. Courtesy Greta Alfaro.

Home is not only the place we inhabit. Home incorporates emotional dimensions, a place where we exist in unity with our surroundings. Yet there are numerous places in which we reside that do not feel like home, such as hospitals, hospices, orphanages, prisons, and immigration detention centres. Although almost no one makes the decision to dwell there, these places remain occupied. Inspired by the history of Landskrona Citadel, Greta Alfaro’s Music of the Spheres reflects on the nature of these spaces in relation to the society we live in.

This new site-specific commission occupies the spherical eastern tower of Landskrona Citadel, in which inhabitants were kept continuously under watch. The fortress became a major penitentiary for inmates serving life sentences. In 1902, it became a forced labour facility for vagrant women, including prostitutes and less able-bodied individuals who did not fit the norms of the time. In the 1940s, the establishment stopped functioning as a prison in order to receive refugees coming from Nazi extermination camps.

The inscriptions on the walls of the cells bear witness to those who inhabited them. Why were there spaces where people who had not committed a crime were confined? Why are historical buildings preserved as museums to remind societies of the brutalities performed by past governments, while new ones are being built for that same purpose, with the only difference being the prosecuted social groups?

Music of the Spheres reflects on one of the biggest topics our times: the violence of covert surveillance. Peepholes allow the audience to look into the cells as if they were guards checking on the prisoners. Inside some of the cells, a ghostly image of an orb-weaver spider and its distinctive spiral wheel-shaped web occupies the darkened space. The giant arachnids appear suspended in the centre of the units, oblivious to the spectacle they have become.

Despite being harmless, these hard-working creatures are the origin of one of the most common phobias amongst humans, causing disgust and fear. Spider webs are at once home to the custodian spiders and a trap to the distracted and unwelcome Other. In contrast, many cultures associate spiders with good luck, creativity, feminine energy, and some even with the portrayal of the mother figure due to their web-knitting skills used to weave the world into existence.

The correlation between spiders and the women and refugees who inhabited the cells of Landskrona Citadel is not fortuitous. Alfaro invites us to reconsider the ambivalence of archetypes, how these change through history, and what is our role in criminalising targeted communities.

Multilayered and complex, Alfaro’s Music of the Spheres invites us to consider the paradoxical relationships of order versus chaos, safety versus entrapment, powerful versus disempowered, us versus them. The fluctuation of our roles within the social structure, the convergence of the physical and digital worlds, and the establishment of covert surveillance, challenge our sense of the world, jeopardising the yearned-for notion of home and the privacy, intimacy and safety associated with it.

For more information on Greta's work, please visit https://www.gretaalfaro.com/