Sam WF: I have made you a throat sculpture Too Dark to Read, 2026
Review by Ruben Hazenbos
Co-curated by Sam WF and Yelim Ki, the HOLE is a series of solo audio exhibitions that take place in the dungeon of Leiden's 14th century prison, the Gravensteen.
On Monday, July 13th, in the midst of a heatwave, I crossed the hot cobbles of the Pieterskerkplein to the entrance of Leiden’s 14th century Gravensteen Prison, temporary home of The Hole, the first in a series of audio exhibitions curated by Sam WF and Yelim Ki. After leaving my phone with the guard, I descended into the cool darkness of the dungeon: a palpable shift in atmosphere.
The paths that run alongside the old cells of the dungeon complex are illuminated faintly through stone portals/skylights, but the cells themselves are pitch dark once you step in. The largest, central cell has no skylight at all: its layout was hard to see, even after letting my eyes acclimate. After groping around in total darkness, my eyes not adjusting at all, I gave up and moved along the hallway into the final room of the complex, a space containing the boiler and the old ovens, which was illuminated by a pair of windows that open into window wells. There I found a chair with a small mp3-player and a set of over-ear headphones, below a CD rotating on a string affixed to the ceiling, like a videogame checkpoint. I sat down, pressed play, and began listening to I have made you a throat sculpture (Too Dark to Read, 2026).
This 21 track album moves between fragments of song, conversation and combinations of both. A recording of a heartbeat leads into the first short song: scratchy, sharp, lo-fi. But after the first of two recordings of a marriage proposal (‘Will you marry me?’ ‘Yes!’), the album warms up. As the bluesier tones of track 4 kicked in, I got up and started walking around. I settled in each dark cell for a bit, letting my eyes get used to the darkness, steadily seeing more of the decay and centuries-old graffiti. Track 6, a dialogue between two prisoners, told a story of confinement and escape as I moved from cell to cell, from light into darkness and back again. The fragments of far away, muted/overheard conversations really stood out in the darkest spaces. These, like the real-life footsteps I could hear from above, made me feel like an eavesdropper, catching glimpses of the outside world.
The heartbeat played again, sounding this time like a rewinding tape. I kept listening, unsure if the album had looped or if this was a reprise. By the time I figured it out, I had decided to commit to a full relisten, recontextualising the tracks by moving through the rooms in a different order. I mostly avoided the well-lit space with the chair this time. Track 6, the prison dialogue, and track 13, a childhood story of hydrophobia underscored by warm guitar plucking, felt most meaningful in total blackness. These tracks (both dealing with precarity of different sorts) capture the two sides of the album: one that embraces messiness and ugly sounds, like the dungeon, and a side that deals with love and family. It is this latter side that I felt was most changed by the context: by confining me/the listener underground, warmth was elsewhere, longed for. Relistening aboveground, the jarring, scratchy sounds reminded me of the prison; inside, my isolation was amplified by the vivid traces of conversation, friendship, beauty, all mixed to sound far away.