What I kept thinking about, both during and after, was permanence and impermanence. It was hard not to with the weight of the cathedral bearing down from above, and surrounded by the sense of centuries of faith.

The use of a Middle High German word to name the installation really interested me.  Not only was it contemporaneous with the building of the crypt, but those who had used Lüsenen as part of their everyday language would not have ever imagined that it would fall out of use. That the words with which they communicated with each other were not permanent, and would not be commonly spoken or heard a few hundred years later. And it combined with the idea that while the sounds played in the installation had been recorded, they are not actually permanent, they only really exist in the moment in which they are heard.

The siting of the installation in the cathedral crypt grounded the experience in centuries of tradition, history and human experience. Moving through the spaces  in such low light conditions created an atmosphere of attention, participants had to listen keenly, had to be aware of who and what was around them. The resulting experience was highly personal, each participant heard the sounds from their own physical perspective, and I was struck by how it commanded total commitment to the moment. There could never be any repetition of the combination of sound or light. I am aware, a couple of weeks later, of how clear my memories of the experience are. I can remember certain moments with much more clarity than I would normally expect, they are imprinted on my memory. My own version of a permanent record.