Synagogue Installation
Centre d'Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, Delme
2004

Curated by Corinne Charpentier

The Delme show was based on the idea to make the whole former synagogue building as one installation by playing with its interior and its architectural characteristics and adding only very few visible elements. The atmosphere of the space was entirely altered by covering all the windows of the building with gelatin film coloring the white interior into deep red. The effect of the red light was intensified with filling the space with smoke by burning ammonium chloride every morning. The smoke remained in the space all the day. The exhibition closed in the evenings at about time of sunset so no other artificial light except the flash was used.

The continuous background sound in the space was a me of slowly shifting low frequency sine waves and various hardly audible sound samples. The other stereo channel was playing back a sine wave sweeping in 60 mins from 0 Hz to 400Hz and the other channel In the reversed order. The spacial qualities of the building were ultimately defining the audible sound creating constantly moving resonance spots in different corners of the house.

The on going atmosphere was randomly broken with a bright white flash and simultaneous piercing sound. The flash was generated with a powerful studio flash light and then reflected to be dome of the synagogue with a large parabolic mirror. This flash turned the whole interior white for an instant. The sound was made with a sampler and both the flashlight and the sampler were triggered with a self constructed random controller. The intervals between the flashes were varying from few seconds to several minutes.

The visitors could only enter the second floor of the Synagogue to the gallery like balcony. From the balcony the visitor could see downstairs the entire room which appeared to be completely empty except for the flashlight and the mirror underneath the dome. The sound system consisting of four active monitors and four active subwoofers was hidden underneath the balcony so that the equipment could not be seen from the second floor.