We have rented one of the many bunkers from World War II from the city of Aarhus to use it as a Sound Chamber for Peace.

This picture shows a city worker digging up the entrance of the bunker that was built under German occupation to protect the people from the allies’ bombing 70 years ago.

There are 312 bunkers in our city that were built in 1944/45 under German occupation to protect the people. They have different shapes and ours is like a dome, with a round ceiling that gives an amazing acoustic. You can sing a tone very gently and it goes around and comes back from all sides to you. It helps you to listen (to yourself) in a very precise way and to sound / sing in a precise way.

The first meeting was held on May 7th 2015 where we sang the vowels to the different directions, our names, some songs and did the fire ceremony.

We will continue with meetings for the public once in a while.

An interesting detail of the construction is the emergency exit in the center of the roof where you could climb up a ladder. The concrete lid at the end is totally overgrown with ivy and can´t be opened right now. We are planning to replace the cover with a glass window so it is possible to have daylight in the Chamber (right now it is totally dark inside if the battery lights are shut off).

It says in the rental contract, that we have to leave within 24 hours in case of a war. But since what we are doing is very powerful we might be able to keep this place forever……

The entrance is beside a main road so there are many people coming by, asking “What are you doing here?” which gives us the possibility to show them around.

Here is a video we made to show you around: Welcome to our Sound Peace Chamber

We are very curious to see how this project is going to develop.

For more information and opening hours of the Sound Chamber contact: Marina and Lukas:  mailto:soundchambereurope@gmail.com

written by Lukas and Marina Budimir, edited by Stella