Requiem for an Exit

Summary

Between 1994 and 2004, Frode Oldereid and Thomas Kvam created a series of robotic installations exploring the intersections between technology, ideology, and collective memory. These robots evoked the aesthetics of political mass movements, echoing the fractured language of 20th-century totalitarianisms and its countercultures. Two decades later, the artists revisit these themes in Requiem for an Exit. At the center of the installation stands a towering robotic figure, four meters tall—a skeletal construct of steel, hydraulics, and circuitry, locked in place, rigid and restrained. Its only means of expression are its voice and a slowly moving head. The towering body dominates the space, yet it is the face that captivates—drawing the viewer in. Digitally sculpted and animated with hyper-realistic detail, the face gives the robot its unsettling presence. Like the demagogues and prophets of history, it uses rhetoric as its only weapon. It speaks not as an agitator rallying a crowd, but as if standing alone in the ruins of its own rhetoric—delivering a monologue that feels more like a solitary reckoning than an attempt to persuade. Its power lies not in physical action, but in the force of its words—delivered with the weight of history, suspended in an acoustic field so dense it almost approaches sculptural form. The voice is calm and deliberate, almost liturgical in its cadence. This affective restraint is mirrored in the soundscape: a low, constant pressure fills the room, not as music but as condition. The voice does not float on top of it—it is caught in it. There are no crescendos. No relief. In this, the robot speaks of genocide—not as an aberration, but as a recurring feature in human history, deeply embedded within our genetic memory. The notion that Neanderthal DNA still present in our genome constitutes a “biological memorial” to our first genocide, occurs not as scientific theory, but as philosophical provocation. From there, the monologue does not escalate—i...