“We once sang a song of old words
Mapping time into the archive of the body.”

– Julianknxx

An ambitious new multi-screen film installation by acclaimed poet, artist, and filmmaker Julianknxx. Known for his extensive research and commitment to (re)visiting places and people for collaboration, this latest work builds on the artist’s performance ‘Chorus is Flight’ presented in May 2024 on the steps of the Stedelijk Museum with the Memoria Collective, conducted by Elique Curiel, in collaboration with Metro54.

What does it mean to return—again and again—to a sound, a word, a gesture? To linger with repetition as both ritual and resistance? In Shifting | Spirit | Time, Julianknxx transforms the echo into matter itself. This new commission, unfolding as a multi-screen film installation at Buro Stedelijk, emerges from the artist’s May 2024 performance with the Memoria Collective on the steps of the Stedelijk Museum. Here, repetition becomes material, a rhythmic pulse that opens up the body to deeper ways of knowing.

The refrain ‘Wai Wai Wai’ is both echo and insistence—a poetic meditation, a sonic ceremony, a call that binds memory to breath. As the voices of the choir rise and return, they carry traces of ancestral histories, of miles traversed, of stories carried forward. This work asks us not simply to hear but to listen—to attune ourselves to the ways sound can hold memory across time and distance.