Enter: Zone

View from the quiet zone. Photo: Mads Kjeldgaard 2025.

The text on the door presents the zone with a certain linguistic ambiguity: ”Quiet zone”. The words are neither prefixed with a definite nor indefinite article, it’s not the quiet zone, or even a quiet zone, just ”Quiet zone” — words floating in space, unanchored. Does this provide some cues as to the essence of this zone? It is in constant movement, on wheels, moving from station to station with its inhabitants for a moment suspended in a fuzzy existence.

All trains in Denmark have this zone, a set of carriages for quietude, rest, and concentration. It is demarcated by a sliding door, the border between the quiet zone and the non-quiet zone. You open the door by waving your hand in front of it. How so? In the roof of the carriage, a small insect eye looks down on you, waiting for you to make a move. Most people wave their hands from side to side, and some do it up and down. The insect waits. Sometimes, it wants to embarrass you, to be another small hindrance in an otherwise stressful day. Just as you have boarded the train and found your way to the entrance of the quiet zone, you are suddenly stranded in front of the glass door. It simply won’t open. The inhabitants on the other side observe you as you frantically perform the hand-waving ritual before the insect’s eyes. You say to yourself: “Why can’t I enter? These are surely the accepted movements, are they not?”. But the insect simply won’t let you in, and it won’t tell you why. There is no justice with the insect; there is a system, and it will not tell you what it is. You are estranged like Kafka’s K., trying to enter the castle, lost in the wilderness of the snow outside its walls and systems. Your movements become desperate — from the calm, and normally accepted linear movements from left to right, to up and down, to all of a sudden performing a small but wild choreography of circular movements, fingers flapping and tracing erratic lines in the air between you and the object of your desire: The zone.

The insect staring down. Photo: Mads Kjeldgaard 2025.

Once inside the quiet zone, you will find it full of sounds. Through the glass doors, you hear conversations on the other side, and every time the doors part to let a person enter or exit, those conversations become amplified. They may be mixed with other sounds, waves of laughter, the beeping of the train indicating the outer train doors being open, until the doors of the zone close shut again, and your attention returns to the inside of it: The low-frequency hum of the engine with a high-frequency harmonic to it. At certain stretches of the commute and in certain weather conditions, a third tone enters, perhaps caused by the friction of the rails, perhaps by something else. And at every station, an announcement of your location and the avenues of travel made possible by it: Here you are, these are the connections you can make here, and the modes of transportation.

View from the quiet zone. Photo: Mads Kjeldgaard 2025.

The promise of the zone is this: Here you may find tranquility, you may be allowed to concentrate or unwind for a moment. You will not be bothered. And yet, there is always something bothering you. The root of this is found upon entering the zone, where you tacitly accept the rules stickered on the door: A phone crossed out with a red line, and next to it an oddly egg-shaped head with a finger to its mouth, shushing you. In other words: Keep quiet. A sense of justice is emphasized by a glassy bowl above you containing a camera. Someone is observing, and you become an intense observer. The rules apply to everyone, you think, and they have a strange effect on your senses, heightening them, allowing you to detect any transgressions of the common ruleset. You were supposed to unwind here, and now your listening is sharpened: Who will be the first to break the rules, and what will be the consequence of this small crime? Sometimes, a person will look at you with hungry eyes, trembling lips, just on the verge of saying something to you, a small nicety or a remark about the weather. It’s almost impossible for them to hold back, and yet, this being the quiet zone after all, and the rules being clear, they do, and they stay silent. At other times, a person sits right under the sign indicating no talking on the phone while talking on the phone. The audacity and stupidity of this paradox cause you to simmer. You consider saying something, but not only would the words uttered punctuate the queitude, the mere act of correcting a stranger is generally socially unacceptable here. Instead, you opt for something far more self-destructive: You do nothing and endure the provocation until you or the other person has to get off the train. Meanwhile, the magic of the zone has crumbled; it is no longer quiet.

— Mads Kjeldgaard, The B-Line S-train in Copenhagen, 2025.

The zone in it's entirety. Photo: Mads Kjeldgaard 2025.

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