Björk’s Cornucopia — a Speculative Future with Feeling

Bjork’s work has become increasingly focused on sensory immersion, consolidating her avant-garde status and creating connection where her music alone can be alienating. Cornucopia, her latest show came to London in November, filling up the void of the o2 arena with the symbols and rituals of her utopia.

Continuing motifs of biophilic sensuality, folklore, vivid futures and aching pasts, gender-spectrum tripping, the cosmic and the microscopic, Cornucopia feels like Bjork’s expression of everything. The venue and the brain couldn’t really contain it.

Greta Thunberg’s face and voice was beamed stadium high during the encore, our collective conscience made omniscient. The Little Sister we need. This intervention perhaps an unnecessarily explicit link from Cornucopia’s concept to our economic reality.

What I left with was a visceral and compelling call to arms to protect and nourish the Earth and her unique place in the universe. Signals of a possible future shot through the senses, straight to the body.

Cornucopia speculates a future utopia emerging from the generative melting of indigenous pasts and technological futures. Björk has always created space for plurality and her appeal for us to “imagine a future. Be in it” invites us all to manifest our own vision of something better. To speculate with feeling and become transformed through recreating ourselves.