Invisible Stories: Dinner Table

For this project we were assigned to create something playing around the subject of invisibility. A topic that we found to resonate with us was the topic of loss, or simply missing a loved one, which plays into the idea of the visible and the invisible, and their ambiguity.

With Tracy Emin’s My Bed (1998) and Felix Gonzales Torres’s Untitled 1991 and Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1987-1991) as inspiration, we decided to create an immersive experience through an installation. This installation would be accompanied with sound, as we were largely influenced by Adam Driver’s karaoke scene in the movie Marriage Story (2019) as well as Benjamin Biolay’s song Brandt Rhapsodie (2009), which both imply the power that our voices hold and the narration and story telling facet that is imprinted in our words.

Our installation is a recreated dinner table, with five covers — four of the five plates are stained with remnants of food whilst the fifth and last one is intact, alluding to the person that has been lost. The sound piece is of recordings of a regular table setting, with cutlery clinking and water pouring, as well as our interviewing of close friends and family members about loss, following a set of questions that we had prepared beforehand. The interlocutors are all speaking in different languages, which highlights their similarity in their diversity, as we noticed the same tone in everyone’s voices when approached with this subject. Recreating this dinner table atmosphere was crucial for us to get our message through and curate this experience revolving around our interpretation of representing invisibility.