Roof of the winds

A multisensory installation that aims to reimagine the experience of a mountain valley within London’s vertical landscape. A slowly turning ceiling sculpture—made from transparent gridded tarpaulin salvaged from construction scaffolding—softens the glare of an industrial bay light to cast shifting patterns of brightness across the room, its rotation subtly modulated by air currents sensed within the space. Four wall-mounted sound sculptures, each resonating with recordings captured atop the city’s tallest buildings, diffuse a polyphonic soundscape whose volumes rise and fall with the changing light. Their proportions mirror those of the skyscrapers they sonify, transforming the dense hum of the city into a hi-fi-like auditory terrain. On the floor, a small “fan speaker” translates live sound into gentle air currents using three fans tuned to different frequency bands. These movements circulate through the room, feeding back into the ceiling sculpture’s motion and creating a self-modulating loop between wind, light, and sound. Drawing on René Daumal’s writings on mountains and imperceptible forces, the installation evokes a sense of place shaped by memory, altitude, and sensory thresholds—suggesting an urban “valley” where the familiar and the uncanny continuously intertwine.