For When We Come to Go: Ambivalent Cosmopolitanism and a Covert New Old Europe in The Graveyard and Gerry de Mol’s ‘Komen te Gaan’

Abstract

In 2008, Belgian video game company Tale of Tales released the 10-minute art game The Graveyard. The central action of this game consists of an old woman walking down a cemetery path, and then sitting on a bench. The game culminates in the playing of Dutch-language folk song ‘Komen te Gaan’, a nostalgic meditation on death written and performed by Gerry de Mol. The Graveyard’s creators fashion themselves as artists within a cosmopolitan modern community, yet the game itself is steeped in nostalgia and haunted by the spectre of Belgium’s place in World War II. de Mol’s song, which functions as the game’s centrepiece, manifests the New Old Europe Sound covertly; by obscuring its borrowings of East European and Jewish musical markers, it reveals an ambivalence towards the changing Europe that contradicts the game-makers’ supposed dedication to multiculturalism.