Installation No. 3 · Part II
Installation Statement
Four perceptual spaces built from Agustina Bazterrica’s The Unworthy, continuing where Part I closed its doors.
THE UNWORTHY pt.1 traced how a closed community writes its order into the body. pt.2 begins at the moment that order starts, almost imperceptibly, to loosen. Nothing collapses. But a single other presence has entered the enclosure.
Through Lucia, the narrator’s faith, body, and memory begin to change. And as this new intimacy takes shape, an older memory pushes up from beneath it: the memory of surviving alongside Circe, outside, before the walls. Two relationships, separated by time, overlap within a single body.
This is not liberation. Intimacy does not replace control; it grows inside it, in the narrow gaps the institution has not yet noticed. Quiet does not become safe. It only becomes shared.
Rooms
If Part I built four rooms inside an enclosed structure, Part II opens them from the inside: slowly, secretly, and without permission.
Secrecy · Threshold
It begins with sounds that cannot be reached, however closely one listens: a low sustained tone, friction close to the ear, a single dry contact. Behind a black door, a second presence answers, and a name becomes the first secret.
Omen · Uncertainty
The room never confirms whether what happened was supernatural. The photograph collapses within a fraction of a second, organic for an instant and smoke the next, while the screen turns between black and white.
Intimacy · Breath
The emotional centre of the installation. Pressure falls, the density of sensation rises, and the pulse moves closer to breathing. Women at a shoreline, outside the walls, dissolve into small drifting lights that belong to no institution.
Memory · Wound
The memory of Circe returns. A portrait of two women is divided into cells and left unaltered beneath the movement. A small cycle sways like a rocking chair until it is cut, stopping at the edge of what cannot yet be spoken.
Two Rooms from the Installation
Each room has its own source photograph and its own visual method. Historical images of women in religious life are rendered in absolute black and white, then divided, scattered, compressed, and rebuilt by sound, but never animated as if they were alive.
A space built for one begins to hold two. The photograph breaks into particles under the pressure of sound, while something human keeps returning from beneath the noise.
Two figures, divided into cells, displaced and returned. The portrait is never made to move as if alive; only the memory it holds is shifted, again and again, until it is cut.
The Installation Continues
The complete Production Note, four track reviews, audiovisual works, advance listening, MP3 and WAV downloads continue beyond this public threshold.
Enter THE UNWORTHY pt.2Source · Photograph · System
Agustina Bazterrica’s novel and four public-domain photographs of women in religious life enter the work as independent, resistant forms of memory.
Part II follows the change that one presence brings to a closed world. The sounds and voices described in the novel are never reproduced; each is replaced by another sound, an interpretation rather than an illustration. The images contain no sexual scenes and no depictions of violence.
In Part II, Quiet Tech Noir turns toward intimacy under surveillance. No exit appears. What changes is the number of presences inside the room, and the memory that refuses to stay buried beneath them.
No photograph and no method is reused across the four rooms. Each image is rendered in high-contrast black and white rather than sepia. It may be destroyed, but it is never given a false life, and its origin is always credited.
01 · Asahel Curtis, Three nuns at Providence Hospital, Seattle · Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain
02 · Amedor, Nuns at Mass · J. Paul Getty Museum
03 · Toni Frissell, [Nuns clamming on Long Island], 1957 · Library of Congress
04 · Machiel Hendricus Laddé, Portret van twee nonnen, c. 1892–1906 · Rijksmuseum / Public Domain
Release Sequence