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.
I visited the HOLE on the day it first opened. I walked to the 14th century prison the exhibition takes place in through the blistering sun that had been heating Leiden for a while. After leaving my phone with Sam, I descended into the cold and dark of the dungeon in search of the audio. Immediately as you enter the dungeon the atmosphere changes entirely, like sensory deprivation. The main path along the old cells is illuminated lightly through skylights leading to the streets above, but the cells themselves are entirely dark once you step through the doorway. After feeling around the bricks of one of the cells in total darkness for a bit and my eyes not adjusting at all I gave up on the cells, and moved along the hallway into the last room of the dungeon complex, which had the most access to outside light. There I found a chair with a small mp3-player and a set of over-ear wired headphones, below a CD rotating on a string affixed to the ceiling. Sitting down, I turned on the mp3-player to hear the audio component of the show; Sam WF’s 2026 album I have made you a throat sculpture.
This 21 track album moves between fragments of songs, conversations and combinations of the two. It starts with a recording of a heartbeat, leading into the first short song. Immediately the album presents a scratchy, sharp guitar tone and lo-fi recordings, but after the first of two recordings of a marriage proposal it switches to a much warmer and fuller sound. As the bluesier guitar tones of track 4 kicked in I started walking around with the mp3-player. I settled in each dark cell for a bit, letting my eyes get used to the darkness and steadily seeing more details as the audio continued. The audio presented a dialogue between two prisoners of the Gravensteen prison while I moved between the rooms, narrating a story of escape and confinement while I went from light to darkness. In this confinement in total darkness, what especially stood out to me were the fragments of far away, muted/overheard conversations. These, like the real life footsteps I could hear from above, placed me into the role of underground eavesdropper, offering a glimpse of the outside world without currently being part of it.
Most of the rooms in the dungeon complex get a tiny bit of illumination through the skylights above the hallways, generally placed in front of each cell entrance. This light barely makes it into the rooms, but gives a relatively clear view of the little steps leading you down from the gate into the cell. There is one exception to this in the complex: the biggest, most central room has no skylight anywhere near its entrance. Here, the layout of the cell is hard to make out even after letting your eyes acclimate to the total darkness. I spent the most time in this room, taking more time to get accustomed to the dark and figure out all the details of the room each time I returned to it. Ultimately I ended up seeing patterns in the stone that weren’t actually there.
As the album finished the mp3-player immediately looped, and this time the heartbeat sounded like rewinding a tape. I kept listening for a bit, not being sure if it had looped or if this was a type of reprise. When I did figure out I was listening to the same tracks again I decided to commit to a full relisten, recontextualizing the tracks through different rooms of the dungeon complex. I mostly avoided the well lit room with the chair this time, and ended up coming back to the darkest room a lot. Track 6, the dialogue between the two prisoners, and track 13, a recounting of a childhood story of hydrophobia over warm guitar plucking, especially felt more meaningful in the total darkness. These tracks, both dealing with the topic of precarity, present two different sides to the album: a side that embraces messiness and ugly sounds, feeling much more like the prison dungeons, and a side that deals with beauty and family, placing the audience of the show into the role of eavesdropper of what is happening outside/above. This second side is changed the most through the context of the location, by placing the audience in the prison, confining the listener underground, the beauty becomes something that is elsewhere. When listening to the album outside of this context, it is the jarring and scratchy sounds that remind the audience of the prison. But inside, the feeling of isolation is amplified by the traces of conversation and moments of beauty, both mixed to sound far away. Through this aesthetic of voyeurism the HOLE leaves its temporary prisoners with a lasting sense of confinement.
