Brothel

An audiovisual interactive installation, made for an exhibition whose subject was heterotopia — Foucault's term for the places that exist alongside the ordinary world and invert it. Of all the heterotopias available, the one selected here was the brothel.

The visitor is given a torch, and the room is dark.

What the search recovers is the lost memory of an erotic experience. As the beam moves, hidden faces emerge from the darkness — always the same woman, never the whole of her. And the light does not only reveal: it triggers. Audio samples are activated by where the beam falls, so that the sound environment is built by the visitor's own searching.

Which means no two people can recover the same memory. The work hands over both the looking and the listening, and what is assembled in the end is private and personal — which is the condition the brothel was a heterotopia of in the first place.