Installation d'art immersif exceptionnelle

Silent Prayer Cube

The installation consists of a white, plain cube, designed as a common space for visitors of different religious groups to embrace their own spiritual lives as well as understanding the cultures of others. Our proposal answers to a highly demanding necessity of creating spaces that serve the need to cultivate and educate towards religious toleration and exonerate its practice. To achieve that we create a timeless hetero-topia(>from Greek τόπος meaning space) in Michel Foucault’s sense of the term, a place of “nowhere” (now-here) that frames a navigation on the states of worship, specifically the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that undeniably share a common ground. By entering the installation, the visitors are introduced to an otherworldly threshold that drastically frames time, flux and possibilities by “saving them in light” as Ernst Bloch would say. A light installment hidden in the suspended ceiling simulating this “topos” own sun, illuminates the cube in three phases (Rise-Meridian-Set) leading up to a moment of absolute darkness until it repeats itself in perpetual motion. Every phase traps in light a silent reminiscent of the three faiths symbols (menorah, cross, crescent) allowing visitors to silently or even unknowingly participate in this mystagogic phenomenon. With this proposal we hope to address the matter of belief either as a cohesive genus of religion and not a sum of standalone subspecies, or a lifestyle choice since it is commonly treated as such in western societies. At the same time we offer the visitors an out-of-body experience and the ability reflect upon themselves or practice freely their religious tradition.