The Whisper Heard

The Whisper Heard is a multimedia installation that is divided into two rooms separated by a curtain. The protagonists of the cinematic panorama are a child and an old man, who both have an unusual relationship to language. While the child is learning to speak, the old man is suffering from aphasia, which impairs his ability to speak. Both of them repeat passages from Jules Verne’s novel A Voyage to the Center of the Earth, which the artist reads to them. The selected scene describes how the hero of the novel is exposed to absolute silence in the Earth’s interior. For the installation, Imogen Stidworthy uses different media elements such as monitors, a parabolic dish and a circular loudspeaker in a way that sound and image layers are separated and can be perceived differently from different positions in the room. Sound and images overlap in a destabilizing way: while viewers see the gesticulating hands of the old man on a screen, his speech is dominated by stuttering, whispering and slurring.



 

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