SHELTER
Participatory immersive exhibition project
The concept
Shelter is a participatory immersive exhibition conceived as a total artwork combining painting, poetry, neuroscience, sound, symbolic systems and collective participation into a single perceptual environment. The project unfolds as an immersive ecosystem where darkness, rhythm, language, bodily perception and visual forms continuously interact. The exhibition includes monumental figurative paintings emerging from blackness, immersive sound compositions, a central flotation installation, sculptural light works created from transformed emergency exit signs titled EXIST, and an evolving collective poem generated by visitors throughout the exhibition. At its core, Shelter asks a simple question:
How can art become a psychic shelter?
The project explores the possibility of creating a space where vulnerability, imagination, symbolic perception and human interiority may still remain accessible within an increasingly accelerated and disembodied world. The title itself subtly contains the word “her”, opening the work toward the feminine, the body and the soul understood as protected inner territories. At the end of each immersive experience, visitors are invited to leave behind a single word emerging from their altered perceptual state. These fragments progressively accumulate into a collective poem unfolding physically throughout the exhibition like a living white line. The exhibition therefore continuously rewrites itself through human participation. This evolving text ultimately becomes a final artwork in itself: a book gathering all the words successively generated through the experience.
Shelter functions simultaneously as immersive installation, perceptual experiment, poetic environment and collective cognitive experience. It seeks to create not a spectacle, but a contemporary refuge for human consciousness.
The therapeutic shelter
Shelter emerges from my research around what I call Neuropoietics: the relationship between rhythm, altered states of consciousness, symbolic perception, embodiment and neuroscience.
At the center of the project lies the theta brainwave frequency, associated with meditation, intuition, creativity, memory and hypnagogic states. Theta states are already explored within meditation, breathwork, neurohacking and certain therapeutic practices because of their potential effects on stress regulation, emotional processing and depressive states.
Yet contemporary conditions of permanent stimulation increasingly reduce access to these slower perceptual states. Constant exposure to screens, information flows, acceleration and cognitive saturation progressively disconnects us from forms of attention linked to introspection, imagination, symbolic perception and deep embodiment. In this sense, theta may be becoming a disappearing rhythm of consciousness. Theta is also considered an essential rhythm for the conscious integration of lived experience itself: what philosophy of mind describes as qualia, the subjective and irreducible texture of human perception, emotion and inner experience. This fragile perceptual depth may constitute one of the most essential dimensions of human consciousness, yet also one of the most threatened by contemporary overstimulation.
Through my parallel practice as a yoga and meditation instructor, I have explored how breath, rhythm, sensory withdrawal and immersive environments can reactivate these altered perceptual states. Shelter attempts to spatialize these conditions through darkness, flotation, sound, rhythm and symbolic immersion. The project functions as a form of perceptual and poetic care: a temporary sensory refuge designed to slow overstimulation and reconnect visitors with forms of inner perception that contemporary environments increasingly suppress.
The white line
The recurring white line is one of the central structures within my work. I conceive it as a metacognitive membrane situated between apparition and disappearance, abstraction and figuration, unconscious and conscious perception. The line remains unstable and protean: fractured, interrupted, organic, architectural or spectral. It may surround figures, cross bodies or dissolve into darkness. Rather than functioning as separation, it functions as permeability. Like skin, it marks the fragile interface between inner and outer worlds.
This porous threshold also reflects the theta state itself: neither fully unconscious nor fully rational, but suspended between both. Artificial intelligence may reproduce forms and language infinitely, yet I question whether it can truly inhabit this unstable territory where embodiment, vulnerability, intuition and symbolic resonance emerge before becoming fixed into systems or data. This human porosity remains one of the deepest foundations of poetry and consciousness itself.
The paintings
Painting remains central to Shelter because it preserves a direct relationship to matter. Pigment itself is dust: carbon, minerals, ash and earth. Humanity comes from dust and returns to dust, while modern cosmology similarly reminds us that our bodies are composed of stardust forged long before human existence. This convergence between primordial dust and cosmic dust forms one of the symbolic foundations of Shelter The recurring motif of the Star therefore represents both origin and return. I often begin my paintings from black surfaces. Black is not emptiness but primordial chaos: the pre-formal state from which forms slowly emerge.
The figures themselves remain unstable, as though attempting to surface from darkness. This process is what I call Figurvival: the survival and resurgence of the figure within abstraction. This return to figuration reflects a broader cultural movement. After decades of dematerialization and hyper-conceptualization, we increasingly return toward embodiment, symbolism, touch and human presence. In a world dominated by algorithmic and disembodied systems, the figure becomes a form of resistance.
Figuration also allows for a direct symbolic dialogue between artwork and viewer without requiring theoretical initiation. Like religious iconography, the work may be experienced simultaneously through emotion, intuition, embodiment and deeper symbolic interpretation without hierarchy between these different forms of perception. The paintings therefore attempt to establish a direct human encounter before interpretation even begins
The poetry
Before becoming literature, poetry was oral, rhythmic, ritualistic and collective. It functioned as chant, invocation, healing practice and perceptual transformation.The Greek notion of rhythmos originally referred not to fixed metric regularity, but to a flowing organization of movement through time. Rhythm was therefore a structure of becoming. What interests me is not simply writing poetry, but placing visitors directly inside a poetic condition before language itself appears.
In Shelter, poetry precedes words. Visitors first enter a poetic state through darkness, sound, flotation, archetypes and rhythm. Language only emerges afterward through the collective poem progressively generated by participants. Poetry therefore becomes spatial, somatic and perceptual rather than purely textual.
The timeless architecture
Shelter draws from symbolic systems that have structured human consciousness across civilizations: mythology, biblical narratives, ritual forms and tarot imagery. I approach these systems not as doctrine, but as ancient metacognitive architectures through which humanity has historically organized fear, exile, desire, sacrifice and transformation.
These symbolic forms survive because they continue to resonate within perception itself. Tarot occupies an important place within the project because it offers a symbolic cartography of recurring human states. The Star card remains central to Shelter, if we are made of stardust, then the star is not only above us but also within us.
The installation
I intend to collaborate with musicians specialized in immersive and frequency based composition in order to create an original sonic environment structured around resonance, breath, slowness and meditative rhythmic patterns.
At the center of the exhibition in a mirror cube, lies a luminous tank flotation installation conceived as the experiential core of the project. Visitors enter a darkened environment where sound, suspension, light and isolation progressively detach perception from external stimulation. The installation uses membrane flotation systems allowing participants to experience weightlessness while remaining dry and physically secure.
Throughout the surrounding darkness, pale figures, white lines and sculptural light works titled EXIST slowly emerge like survival signals within the space. At the conclusion of the experience, visitors discover that the surrounding exhibition and other participants had always remained present beyond the apparent opacity of the structure. Solitude suddenly opens into collective consciousness.
The collective poem
At the end of each immersive session, visitors contribute one word generated from their experience in any language. Over time, these fragments accumulate into a monumental evolving poem moving throughout the space like a living luminous white line. This functions as a form of collective neurofeedback. Their responses reshape the perceptual environment itself. The artwork therefore becomes a living cognitive organism structured through shared immersion. Each participant enters individually, yet each participant leaves behind a trace transforming the exhibition for others, until the final collective printed poem.
Shelter is ultimately built upon a movement of return: a return to human genesis, to matter, rhythm, embodiment and primordial symbolic structures. A return to poetry before language, to darkness before form, to dust and stardust as the origins of human consciousness.This return is not nostalgic but regenerative. After abstraction, we return toward the organic. After hyper conceptualization, toward embodiment. After disembodiment, toward sensations, presence and perception. I believe this fragile perceptual threshold is where something essential about humanity still survives: our poetry within our porosity. Shelter attempts to create an healing contemporary sanctuary where this human threshold may still be collectively experienced, not as spectacle but as a poetic refuge for consciousness.
I am currently seeking curatorial, institutional, musical and technical collaborators interested in helping develop and realize Shelter as a large scale participatory immersive exhibition.