Most multi-screen installations play everything at once. You walk into a dark room, several projections are running, and you choose where to look — which is a kind of freedom and also a kind of nothing, because the work has declined to structure your attention.
Marina Abramović’s Seven Deaths at Cisternerne in Copenhagen does the opposite, and the difference is the whole piece.
What it is
Abramović performs seven operatic deaths, drawn from famous roles sung by Maria Callas — Violetta dying of tuberculosis in La traviata, Tosca jumping to her death — in filmed sequences opposite the actor Willem Dafoe, accompanied by Callas’s recorded voice.
Cisternerne is a former underground water reservoir beneath Søndermarken park in Copenhagen. It is damp. Water drips throughout. It is not a gallery that happens to be below ground; it is a piece of Victorian municipal waterworks that someone decided to put art in.
The installation: multiple small theatre-like spaces emerge from darkness, each with a screen and seating. Only one film plays at a time. Visitors have to migrate between viewing areas through the dark. Sound travels beyond individual theatres, and the ambient water continues throughout.
Abramović’s framing: “you give me your time, and I die for you seven times” — with the observation that “you die many times in life, and yet you continue living.”
14 March – 30 November 2026. Just under two months left.
Why “only one plays at a time” is the design decision that matters
Three things follow from it, and all three are hard to get any other way.
It makes the audience move, and the walking is part of the work. After each death you have to get up and find the next screen, in the dark, in a damp reservoir. That interval is not dead time between videos — it is where the previous death sits and settles. A simultaneous installation would let you absorb all seven as a texture. Sequencing them with a walk between forces each one to be a discrete event with an aftermath, which for a work about dying repeatedly is exactly the point.
It solves the audio problem by embracing it. Seven films playing at once in a reverberant stone vault would be an acoustic catastrophe — Callas’s voice from seven directions, phase-smeared by a space with a reverb time measured in seconds. One at a time means the sound is coherent. And the deliberate leak — sound travels beyond the individual theatres — turns the architecture into a delivery mechanism: you hear the next death before you find it, and you hear the last one behind you as you leave.
It makes scarcity the medium. You cannot see death four while death two is running. You have to choose, and wait, and arrive. That is the inverse of the on-demand condition everything else operates under, and it is unusually appropriate for a piece built from opera — an art form whose entire power depends on being in a room at a time something irreversible happens.
The venue is a collaborator, not a container
Cisternerne is one of the great art spaces in Europe for reasons that have nothing to do with curation: it is dark, cold, acoustically extraordinary, and wet. The dripping is not atmosphere added by a sound designer. It is groundwater.
For anyone who makes immersive work, this is worth examining as a case study in what a site gives you for free:
- Total darkness you do not have to build. No light leak, no blackout drapes, no compromise with a fire exit sign.
- Humidity and cold as somatic content. The audience’s body is registering the space continuously. Discomfort is a kind of attention, and a work about mortality in a cold wet vault is pushing on something a white cube cannot reach.
- Reverberation as a given. The space will do things to sound whether you want it to or not. Designing with a three-second tail is a different craft from designing in a treated room, and the results are not reproducible anywhere else.
- Historical weight. It stored the city’s drinking water. The building has a prior civic life that the audience senses even without being told.
The corresponding caution: damp is hostile to equipment. Running screens, projectors and amplifiers for nine months in a space with liquid water on the walls is a real engineering problem — condensation, corrosion, mould in optics — and any proposal for a space like this needs a plan for it that is more than optimism.
Where it sits
Seven Deaths has existed in other forms — Abramović’s 7 Deaths of Maria Callas premiered as an opera at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2020, with the filmed sequences and Dafoe. What Cisternerne offers is the de-theatricalised version: the same material, extracted from a proscenium and a fixed running order, and rebuilt as something you navigate.
That transposition — a staged work re-authored as an installation whose structure the audience has to walk — is a move worth stealing. Plenty of performance work has a second life as spatial work, and the translation is usually more interesting than documentation.
If you are planning October or November travel, this is the one on the current European circuit most worth the detour. We flagged four other shows in our October radar two days ago; this one closes last and is the most architecturally specific of them.