Voices on Suffering

Mental distress has become one of the most pressing social issues of our time. At the same time, our understanding of suffering is shaped by competing narratives – biomedical, psychological, social, existential, and economic – where certain perspectives are granted greater authority than others. These narratives are not neutral: they influence self-understanding, healthcare practices, and what is considered legitimate or “real” suffering. Voices on Suffering is an artistic and psychological research project that explores how narratives of mental distress are produced, authorized, and transformed into cultural frameworks for meaning-making. The project brings together critical psychological research and artistic practices rooted in acousmatic and intermedial sound art. Rather than privileging a single explanatory model, the project creates a polyphonic space in which multiple narratives can be experienced simultaneously, without hierarchical ordering. Through an intermedial sound installation, audiences encounter parallel “voices” – including biomedical, therapeutic, social, existential, and lived-experience perspectives – articulated through sound, text, light, and spatial composition. By detaching voices from visible bodies, the work opens a reflective space in which visitors can experience how different understandings of suffering coexist, clash, and shift. The project aims to develop new artistic and scholarly approaches to understanding mental distress beyond reductive or dominant narratives. By foregrounding issues of stigma, epistemic power, and meaning-making, Voices on Suffering contributes to a more nuanced, plural, and humane understanding of what it means to suffer in contemporary society.

Kent Olofsson is a composer with an extensive artistic output spanning a broad artistic field: orchestra, chamber music, electroacoustic music, rock music, theater, dance productions, radio plays, film, and opera. Over the past decade, his work has largely focused on contemporary performing arts. For many years, he has worked with the Malmö-based theater group Teatr Weimar, where they have brought together performing arts, instrumental and electronic music, and video, often with a politically reflective side to contemporary society. He often collaborates with performing artist Nina Jeppsson, a collaboration that has received considerable attention. Their latest project is the feature film “Zonen,” a project that also resulted in the hour-long electroacoustic suite “Zona – music at the threshold.” From 2021 to 2025, Olofsson was a professor of performing arts at Stockholm University of the Arts, and from 2026 he will be a professor at the Malmö Academy of Music at Lund University, where he will work with doctoral education in artistic research.

Martin Wolgast is a licensed psychologist and associate professor of psychology who conducts research focusing on critical perspectives on mental illness, psychiatric diagnoses, and meaning-making processes surrounding mental suffering. His research concerns, for example, how different explanatory models influence attitudes, stigma, and the understanding of what counts as legitimate or “real” suffering. He has published both empirical and theoretical works in this field. In addition, his research has addressed how social power relations and inequalities—particularly those related to racism—are reproduced and expressed in various areas of society.