Jacob Dwyer - The Devil Museum

Somewhere between ambient, soundtrack, and an audio play. The tragicomedy and melancholy of a halted art project and a restless mind turning in on itself; as daydreams, farce, and the surreal transform into a blue and beautiful narrative.

“In January, 2018, I travelled to Lithuania. I was staying in a small wooden cabin in the middle of a forest and was there to photograph all 3000 sculptures in the nearby Devil Museum. The project was funded by the Mondriaan Fund but two months earlier I’d lent the entire budget (8,000€) to my friend, Martin. He’d just gotten a new job at Rainbow Solutions. I’m not sure what they did but they'd given him a company car with a huge sunroof and a big rainbow printed on the bonnet.

Over the following four weeks in Lithuania I kept an audio diary and recorded sounds in and around my cabin. I met no one and spoke about meeting no one. I remembered Crow Man and the time I sold my mum a kilo of scallops. I listened to the door hinge and I recorded the river, with its small islands of ice brushing up against the banks like a pulse. It’s a nice word, ‘pulse’; the motion of an artery as blood is driven through it by the heart.

The Devil Museum is an audio drama made up from these recordings. It’s scored with original compositions by Kareem Lotfy and was put together and mixed in collaboration with Jacob Oostra.”

Jacob Dwyer