WHEN THE SHIMMER OF ETERNITY STARTS TO FADE

Since 2018, an interdisciplinary group of artists and scientists has been working together through a shared exploration of microbes. Those invisible agents that continuously transform the material world. Microbes break everything down, they make matter age, shift, and disappear, challenging our understanding of permanence and time. This ongoing research unfolds within the Hallwyl Museum, a place originally created with the intention of lasting forever. Every object and interior was carefully preserved against decay. Within this context, the project poses a central question: What does it mean to explore decomposition in a space devoted to eternity?

When The Shimmer of Eternity Starts to Fade brings together dance, visual art, music, and scientific reflection. Through these intersecting perspectives, the work invites audiences to reflect on two fundamental concepts: eternity and decomposition. What does eternity mean, and how do we relate to it? What does decomposition reveal about life, transformation, and continuity? The experience takes the form of a guided journey through the museum’s timeless rooms, where objects, paintings, and spaces begin to shift in meaning. A central motif is mother-of-pearl, a material used across cultures in jewellery, sacred artefacts, and ceremonial objects. Known for its iridescent beauty, it has long symbolized purity, protection, and permanence.

Within a carefully composed atmosphere of shimmering darkness, two dancers move in search for a portal into eternity. In one of the rooms, a performer enters into dialogue with ordinary objects, as potential gateways to other dimensions, blurring the boundaries between the physical and the imagined. At moments, the dancers seem to exist in eternity or an afterlife, at others they remain in the ordinary world, reaching toward something beyond it. Objects in the rooms shift under their gaze, becoming threesholds. The stairway too becomes a portal, a crossing between worlds, temporalities, and perspectives. The boundaries between the physical and the imagined dissolve, and the museum itself becomes a space of transformation.

Choreographer: Carima Neusser
Performers: Lana Hosni, Emelie Wahlman
Visual artists: Per Hüttner, Freddie Ross
Researchers: Giada Lo Re, Robert Ooostenveld

Performances: Hallwyl Museum, November 4, 6, 7, 8, 2025
Production: Hallwyl Museum, Vision Forum
Funded by: Kulturbryggan, The Nordic Culture Fund