Location The couchette at the Railway Museum, Godthåbsvej 10, 7600 Struer

Sounds from a massive moving steel machine, creaking and rattling, blurred sounds and fragmented voices in the passenger compartments mixed with intermittent garbled train announcements from another country, interlaced with layered real-time messages captured from within the night train from Struer to Copenhagen. From the departure from Struer late in the evening at 11:17pm till the arrival in Copenhagen the next morning at. 5:44am. 

Hypnagogia is the stage between being awake and asleep. In this state letters on a page dance and meanings twist in new directions. This state of being has inspired Maia Urstad – spending “slow time” on the rails from one distant place to another, gives an opportunity to conjure this altered state – in this sound installation from a DSB (Danish State Railways) couchette, which once drove through the night back and forth from Struer to Copenhagen in the period between 1987 and 1997.

Distance is an imaginary quantity in the couchette, as well as in slumber, dreams move closer to a surface and the notion of places far away gets under the skin, raising up into the compartment of memories and through to the palpable world of the senses. The next station is a stop someplace on the globe. Copenhagen, Kumamoto, Krakow… The platform plays as a starting point, and the conductor’s blown whistle signals as an opportunity, a kick off. Slow time, three days at a window, moving scenery, streams of thought… Passport, Visa, language, escape, future, hope. Welcome aboard!