Lappis Screams is a video artwork consisting of a juxtaposed and time-synced combination of ten instances of the weekly screaming at Lappkärrsberget, Stockholm.
The Scream
No place in the world is like Lappkärrsberget, the largest student village in Sweden. Located to the immediate north of Stockholm University and home to over 3000 students, the village has the vibe of an autonomous zone (albeit somewhat tidier) with its own unique culture.
Collective screaming is a tradition observed in several Swedish student villages, purportedly as a way to alleviate study stress. Flogsta in Uppsala, Lappkärrsberget (Lappis) in Stockholm, and Delphi in Lund are several examples of the phenomenon.
In the case of Lappis, the scream is performed every Tuesday at 10pm. Students would open their windows and scream at the top of their voices for around two minutes.
The video
I recorded ten weeks of the Lappis scream from my student room during April to June 2022. I juxtaposed these videos (time-synced) and created the artwork.
Interactive version (Pop Up Arts—Copenhagen, 2023)
Pop Up Arts is an art festival in public space, run by students in Copenhagen. In 2023 they selected this video artwork as one of the exhibits.
For this exhibition, I created an interactive verison where visitors can scream into a microphone to activate louder screams (made possible via a JavaScript snippet).
The artwork was exhibited on Israels Plads in Nørreport, one of the several location of Pop Up Arts throughout Copenhagen.
You can experience the interactive version online. Simply click “allow” when prompted to allow the browser to access the microphone, and scream into your device to activate a louder scream.