The purpose of this piece is the same as on former occasions, to set up a large installation with a poetic character. This is a wall for freedom of speech where the feelings of people can be shown uncensored. It is made of light and casual sound. It is a great wall covered with thousands of notebooks with blank pages taking over the public space. This time, the piece was adapted to the circular shape of a roundabout in the city’s downtown area.
Project Name: On Blank Pages. Nuit Blanche Taipei
Studio Name: luzinterruptus
The humongous cylindrical surface was perceived as a continuous infinite space for freedom of speech, created to host a huge collage formed by anonymous private interventions which the wind moved at will offering a myriad of random compositions thanks to these collective contributions.
An essential part of the piece was the sound made by the moving pages which turned the surface into a unique constant voice composed of each and every one of the ideas and thoughts printed on the moving lighted paper. As the location was a roundabout, the air currents that built up did a better job of moving the pages and making the sound.
To shape the piece, we built a circular structure with scaffold parts, with a 20-meter diameter and 3.5 meters high. It hid inside all the elements that formed the roundabout. We placed 4,000 notebooks on this structure.
Before placing the notebooks, people were asked to participate by sending messages on the festival’s social networks. People were called on to share their feelings and emotions and whatever opinion they did not dare to express during the lockdown, and to say what this new life of relative normality represented to them.
These messages were randomly printed on different notebooks so that they could be later read. During the Nuit Blanche event, visitors were invited to write on the remaining pages whatever they wished to share.
