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A cinematic soundscape of nature & time
The exhibition
An ancient laurel forest, shot in a single misted day, hung inside a landmark on the Leidsestraat.
Fanal is a real forest on Madeira, part of the UNESCO-listed Laurisilva, where centuries-old laurels stand in near-constant mist. Photographer Felix Morrison shot the exhibition’s black-and-white series there in one day in May; Ylenia Asaro curated and modeled the project. It debuted in 2024 on the gallery floor of NIO House Amsterdam, the MVRDV-renovated Metz Building, crowned by Gerrit Rietveld’s glass pavilion and now the European flagship of EV maker NIO. A public gallery inside a car brand’s house made an unlikely home for the show, and for Kaspar’s first photography exhibition.
The score
Not background music, the exhibition’s unspoken narrator, fifteen minutes long
Kaspar composed a continuous orchestral score that turns a print show into a deconstructed film. Inspired by evenings at the Concertgebouw, it moves in three parts, mirroring the exhibition’s structure and the lifecycle it traces, of a forest and of a life. The hardest part was restraint: enough to carry a real emotional arc, never so much that it overpowered the delicate, near-silent images.
Sweeping tutti passages and solo section melodies, layered with ambient texture, the mist, in sound.
Ethereal, far-off choral harmonies echoing the melancholy of the black-and-white imagery.
Field-recorded ambiance woven through the orchestra, wind through branches the camera never shows.
Breakdowns treated as importantly as the music, space to stand with each photograph.
In the room
The response
Visitors didn’t just look. They stayed
People moved through the room slower than a silent show allows, describing an almost meditative state, the music, they said, deepened how they saw each photograph. For Kaspar it became a turning point: proof that sound isn’t a backdrop to an image but part of how we feel it, and the start of a longer fascination with sound, nature and time.
Credits