For ten days between 26 March and 4 April, Olafur Eliasson presented A symphony of disappearing sounds for the Great Salt Lake, a multimedia installation projected onto a luminous sphere in Memory Grove Park, a public green space tucked into one of the Salt Lake City’s seven canyons below Capitol Hill. It was the Icelandic Danish artist’s first public work in Utah.
Free and open to the public, the work unfolded among prematurely blooming cherry blossom trees along the park’s paths, where a creek threads through a canyon towards the Great Salt Lake—an early spring in plain sight, and a quiet index of the climate instability shaping the lake’s decline. One of 13 installations staged across the city, A symphony was commissioned as part of Wake the Great Salt Lake, a multi-year initiative spearheaded by the Salt Lake City Arts Council, in partnership with the mayor’s office and Bloomberg Philanthropies, to draw attention to the lake’s rapid decline.
What does extinction or a shrinking lake sound and look like? This is the question that structured Eliasson’s project. The artist describes this work as “a symphony the animals are performing for us”, a framing that decentres human viewers while imploring us to consider our role as stewards of the lake.
Visually, the installation unfolded across the surface of a three-storey-tall elevated sphere (rented from a party supplier), with four projectors beaming from sites around the park. Glowing like a beacon after dark, the sphere at times appeared fully three-dimensional—like a suspended, glowing planet. Starting promptly at 9pm each night, the sequence began with a flickering field of light, like a constellation or swarm, before resolving into shifting light streaks of wind currents rippling across the surface.
The sound of birds cut through streaks of red and orange, followed by intersecting meridian lines gridding the sphere into a kind of speculative globe. As the soundscape thickened, the abstract visual also shifted. Pulsating rainbow shapes grew and shrank over the crescendo of a chorus of chirping frogs. At its most intense, the projection resembled a psychedelic stained-glass window or a prismatic weather system, its colours bending and refracting like geothermal light or the aurora borealis.
© Olafur Eliasson. Photo: Kim Raff/Salt Lake City Arts Council
Felicia Baca, the director of the arts council, tells The Art Newspaper that a focus on hopeful futures for the lake and city was important to both Eliasson and the council. She adds that Utah is a place where people are connected to the singular landscape, and that acute climate anxiety affects the politics around the lake.
“We wanted to serve local artists but also bring in renowned international artists with the same value sets,” Baca says. “We know environmental issues aren’t in a vacuum. They’re global, and we wanted to connect local artists to someone who may not know the area but understands the issues.”
The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking rapidly because of upstream water diversion for agriculture, urban growth and industry. To illustrate this—and to immerse his audience—Eliasson pulled numerous field recordings from the Western Soundscape Archive, an audio resource that documents the changing soundscapes of the US West, and worked with the Welsh producer Koreless to assemble a layered 30-minute composition of nonhuman lake life. The hum of brine flies, for example, evoked the rising salinity that threatens the brine shrimp they depend on. Meanwhile, the calls of migratory birds echoed across a habitat increasingly destabilised as millions lose a critical stopover site.
Later in the presentation, a low, ambient churn of wind and water systems reverberated against the reality of receding shorelines. The exposed lakebed generates toxic dust storms that carry arsenic and other pollutants into surrounding communities. Climate change and reduced snowpack intensify these conditions, and within Eliasson’s immersive soundscape, disappearance registered as both presence and absence—a chorus thinning in real time, even as it filled the cold early spring air at Memory Grove Park.
Eliasson’s A symphony brought attention to ecological issues and pulled international attention to Salt Lake City. (It also looked great on social media.) As Baca likes to point out, the overarching Wake the Great Salt Lake project is a play on words: both a mournful wake for a disappearing planet and an awakening for the public to serve as witnesses and, hopefully, take action.
