There is a state of mind that belongs to neither waking nor sleep. It is the threshold we cross each night and morning. In this in-between, the mind loosens its grip, and half-remembered images and sounds come up and dissolve before we can hold them. Whispers are energetic entities that inhabit this transitional space. They are hybrid beings, difficult to grasp and refusing to be fixed.

The work plays with the notion of a lullaby, but lets go of the human voice. A lullaby is a song of care, sung by a mother or a caregiver to carry a child into sleep. As adults we rarely listen to lullabies, instead we search for other sounds. Very often, these are the sounds of nature, or instruments that imitate them, which gently shows a path to the care we recieve found outside the human.

The installation takes its form from a crib mobile. At its centre is a piece of obsidian — a stone used long before mirrors existed to see one’s own reflection, and held, in many traditions, as a threshold between worlds: the living and the dead, the seen and the unseen. Around it hang seashells, minerals, and glass beads, that create sounds once in movement. Their bodies are records of the times during which they were formed. As shells harden into stone, they accumulate and fossilise memories of events and influences the same way the unconscious does. Each element brings its own history into the common sound.

The Book of Whispers, sealed inside the mobile, remains visible but impossible to open. What the whispers have spoken is recorded there, held at the centre of the installation, but the words remain a secret. The installation is accompanied by a web-based catalogue holding a documentation of each whisper found, but of course there are many more. Through a QR code you can learn more about them, and see what one of them might once have told you.

The project was presented during the Symbiotic Glitches exhibition by AC+ collective at Lobe Block, Berlin, 7–9 August 2026.