Untold Movements – Act 3: Luxembourg, is a 45-minute loop of synchronised 30-channel sound composition in 3 parts, peaking every 15 minutes. It sees the city as Saskia Sassen’s new frontier zone where people from different worlds meet. The compositions features the late Indonesian author Sobron Aidit (1934–2007) who was exiled during the Suharto government, in a structure inspired by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Borges’s intriguing renderings of the great English author William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Interweaving documentary sound bites on Sobron (from 2005 to 2007) with new recordings made for this piece – including narrated excerpts
from Borges’s and Shakespeare’s works – the piece poetically reimagines a fragment of Sobron’s exile in the city of Paris, where he was preoccupied with the yearning to return home. Paris’s Luxembourg train station is
where Sobron marked time, as he went to work in the Indonesian restaurant on Rue de Vaugirard – well-known as a Co-op of Indonesian political exiles in Paris – and to write his version of history in a nearby internet café. Luxembourg station is also where Sobron eventually collapsed because of a fatal heart attack, while waiting.
In this multilingual sound composition, Borges’s renditions of Shakespeare (especially Sonnet 123) are summoned up by Sobron’s whistling (a reference to Borges’s Shakespeare’s Memory). All takes place in Luxembourg as one of the hexagonal galleries in Borges’s La Biblioteca de Babel (1941, translated to French by Nestor Ibarra in 1951, and published in English 1962), a universe “congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.” In this Library, people spend their lifetime journeying in quest of an impenetrable book until they die, their bodies dissolving in an infinite fall through unfathomable air.
