The installation ‘LET’S ALL SLOW DOWN TIME TOGETHER’ started with Florinda Ciucio’s visual exploration of open landscapes and urban panoramas and the question of why we seek these places out to find solace, comfort and reflection.

The installation is based on the proven fact that the emotional state of ‚being in awe’, prolongs your perception of time. Therefore the viewer is confronted and reintroduced with the element of time, regaining a sense of control, by elongating the perception of these minutes.

At the same time it is a symbolic live intervention by all coming together to try to prolong our individual perceptions of this time, creating a slower pace at that moment in this room together.

Sharing a state of contemplation is a disappearing public act. There are only few places left in public space that elicits a communal experience of reflection. Watching the sunset together is one that people still cherish, an act that still mobilises a diverse crowd, that can bring people together to create the energy of a communal moment.

The sound based on this concept started with the addition of a church bell, which was cropped, slowed down and played in reverse, so that its known attributes were blurred. The bells are slowly replaced by the sound of hissing birds. The church bell itself has a very rich texture and therfore is a great fixed sound to manipulate its time structure. Also the church bell itself draws attention to the social role of churches within time structuring in europe, before the inauguration of a global time at the end of 19th century. Before this, villages had been regulated acoustically mainly through the chronology of churches.