About this Event
Swedenborg House is pleased to announce The Earths Within Us (2026) by Swedish artist duo Lundahl & Seitl, a limited run of site-sensitive embodied performances at the historic home of the Swedenborg Society throughout November. Configuring Swedenborg House as an architectonic body with organs, visitors wearing wireless headphones and sightless goggles will—for 25 minutes—be led by unseen hands through a soundscape of water, stone and voice, whilst around them choral drones echo the rivers lost beneath London. The new commission is the artists’ first major presentation in the UK since the critically acclaimed Symphony of a Missing Room at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2014.
Extending from Lundahl & Seitl’s perennial work River Biographies, in which participants embodied the waters of the Huangpu, Indus and Ruhr rivers and the Bosporus strait, The Earths Within Us finds affinity with the concept of correspondences between material and spiritual worlds developed by eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher and visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg. The artists state ‘What has been done to the rivers of the Earth—regulated, buried, redirected, extracted—has also been done to the self, in what we learn not to feel. The Earths Within Us moves in two currents, one outer and one inner. Every step taken inside Swedenborg House, every material threshold crossed, corresponds with the participant’s inner architecture’.
The Earths Within Us also presents Words Dissolved By Tears (2026), Lundahl & Seitl’s first sculptural work, and the first in an ongoing series of glass discs, each rendered with an invisible micro-relief of crystallized water from seas, rivers, springs and tears. As light passes through the glass, the crystallized residue bends it into a caustic, or pattern of refracted light on the wall. The work links to Swedenborg’s own microscopic studies of salt, from which he developed a pioneering theory of geometric crystal formation that anticipated modern crystallography by nearly two centuries. Lundahl & Seitl say ‘Inspired by Swedenborg House, the glass disc holds a single tear, shed in this time of war, a crystallized form as the shape of a hidden motion’. Words Dissolved By Tears can only be seen when experiencing The Earths Within Us.
A new book accompanies The Earths Within Us, edited by Devin Zuber, Associate Professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. A framing essay by Zuber situates the artists within a visionary tradition and reads their work alongside Swedenborg’s embodied mysticism. The book includes contributions from and an interview with Lundahl & Seitl and is published by Swedenborg House for the Swedenborg Archive Series.
LUNDAHL & SEITL have exhibited all over the world, including at the Royal Academy of Arts (UK), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Germany), Momentum 8 (Norway), Centre Pompidou Metz (France), 3rd Kochi Muziris Biennale (India) and the commissioned work Echoes of Alternative Histories at Staatstheater Kassel during documenta 15.
BANNER IMAGE: LUNDAHL & SEITL, installation view of Embodiment Session as part of River Biographies – Orphans, 2025, Liljevalchs Konsthall Stockholm (Sweden). Photo Credit: courtesy Liljevalchs Konsthall.
FIRST IMAGE: LUNDAHL & SEITL, River Biographies – Huangpu, 2025, Westbund Museum with Chronus Art Centre. Photography: Dennis Debel.
SECOND IMAGE: LUNDAHL & SEITL, Bosphorus, 2026. Caustic glass commissioned by Istanbul Modern for the Exhibition Flowing City as part of the IASPIS Istanbul Exchange Programme. Image render: Rayform, Lausanne.
‘For almost half a decade, we have followed water across the world and into the body. Tracing rivers to their sources, we came to see how a single form repeats at every scale: a coastline holds the same figure however close you look; a delta branches like the vein of a leaf, like the tributary of a tear. The water outside and the water within, they found, are cut to the same pattern.’–Lundahl & Seitl
Event venue & nearby stays
Swedenborg House, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London, United Kingdom
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