Silent Cry / Our Little Secret

“Silent Cry / Our Little Secret” is an interactive sound and neon outdoor installation. I was commissioned by Piano Nobile Gallery, Geneva, to produce a new work for an International Exhibition Expo 02 Morat, Switzerland. The exhibition was sponsored by the Red Cross and involved many galleries across Switzerland. The theme of the exhibition was forms of violence.

The phrase “Our Little Secret” a double-edged saying that was rendered in neon in English, Italian, German and French, the four languages used in Switzerland, each phrase being illuminated one after the other, showing a different light. The 8ft. neon sculpture was sited in a forest among the trees, where a series of loudspeakers lining an ascending staircase were triggered by the approach of the viewer via infrared sensors. These speakers filled the forest with a collage of sounds, a soundscape within the landscape; a baby crying, children playing, a cocktail party, a crowd at a football match, breaking glass, a dog barking, all functioning as an auditory trope for the process of recollection, triggering a web of reminiscence in each viewer’s memory as in “The Remembrance of Lost Time” Proust wove an epic biographical reminiscence triggered by the taste of a Madeleine cake.

The sound track culminates with a thunderstorm, intentionally bringing the viewer into a cinematic space where the actual environment is perpetually altered by the soundscape,. Here the ‘chill’ of the thunderstorm changes the actual landscape and the after-image of the neon “Our Little Secret” evokes a mysterious atmosphere. Memory can be seen as the camera's ‘eye’ a collage of fragments of images in endless feedback mode, a seductive ‘tableau’, a virtual environment of meaning and context, a conceptual cinema, the dynamic between fantasy and reality that epitomizes our contemporary life.