Waves of Memories

Waves of Memories is a thirty-minute sound and light installation made with the Dutch visual artist Anne Van De Star for the Mamut Art Project in Istanbul, where it was shown in April 2018.

Visitors entered a darkened room in which a field of suspended, slowly moving fabric caught projected light like the surface of water seen from below. The sound — diffused from loudspeakers around and above — was made from memories people had given us: short recordings, collected over the preceding weeks, of strangers describing a place they could no longer return to. The voices were stretched, layered and passed across the room in slow waves, so that a single word would arrive from one side, swell, and recede, and at the crest of each wave the recordings would briefly become intelligible before dissolving again into tone. The thirty-minute cycle rose and fell four times and then began again.

It was my first installation, and the first time I worked with other people’s voices as material — something that has stayed with me since.