Submerge Festival, Avonmouth Community Centre, Box Gallery, We The Curious, Bristol (2019)
Leviathan’s Temple was a three-month commissioned installation created for the Box Gallery at We The Curious as part of Submerge Festival 2019. Working as a collective, we developed an immersive sound, sculptural, and projection-mapped environment that brought together community collaboration, generative audio-visual systems, and scenographic thinking.
The project was developed in close collaboration with participants from Avonmouth Community Centre, who worked with us to reflect on their relationships with the sea and contribute personal narratives that informed the installation’s evolving soundscape. These voices became part of a layered audio composition, combining spoken word, fractured sound, and abstracted ‘whale song’ to form a continuously shifting sonic environment.
Conceptually, Leviathan’s Temple depicts the interior of a whale’s skull as a non-space without temporal constraint. It is imagined as a place of pause and contemplation, offering visitors a moment removed from urgency and disquiet. A reclaimed timber structure hangs from the ceiling like a stalactite, while pulses of light move through the space like synapses firing within a vast, living body. Sound resonates through the gallery, alternately muffled and explicit, soothing and unsettling, as light and audio respond to one another in an undulating rhythm.
The installation draws on the social and environmental histories of post-industrial maritime communities in the South West of England, taking the shifting currents of the Gulf Stream as a metaphor for economic, cultural, and ecological change. Alongside work in Bristol, the project connects to earlier Leviathan research developed in the Arctic regions of Northern Norway, linking local and global maritime narratives.
Inside the Box Gallery, a generative system continually recomposed audio, projected text, light, and image, ensuring that each visitor encountered a unique sensory experience. Rather than offering conclusions, the work functioned as a forum for reflection, allowing moments of connection to emerge within complex, overlapping stories.
As part of the project, we hosted a venue and programme of talks for the University of Bristol’s Connected City Conference, extending the installation into a space for dialogue, discussion, and shared inquiry.