CD+Book, art edition Original sound installation by Eiki Mori (born 1976 in Ishikawa, Japan).  A horn speaker, used to send small sounds far away, will emit whispers of various voices that read Mori’s poems in multiple languages. In the galley space, these voices shall sound nostalgic but at the same time be felt as if they are heard for the first-time, coming from somewhere around the globe. The 15 shibboleths written down for this installation do not really stand for symbolic things or events. They are more of subtle emotions and feelings, or day-to-day sight of daily experience that pass by so easily, that haven’t even been verbalized yet.

I asked 25 friends with totally different backgrounds—ages, language, nationality, religious beliefs and sexualities— to choose their favorite phrase to recite.  Though the words emanated are unreliable and vulnerable for its unfamiliar language, they are also fresh and straightforward, like the babbling of a baby. All that could be done was to read each word with your heart, under the anxiety of not knowing how your imitation of the language and its pronunciation will be taken, or how much it would make sense. Their voices were recorded in such situations.

A secret word that consists of two verses with different depths of depiction, that comes back and forth in the flow of time throughout a day, or throughout a lifetime. By being uttered by an individual, and being responded like a self-interaction, the verses distinctly emerge with the existence of another time axis, the vividness of memory and emotion, the elaborateness, the ambiguity, and its voice… And we find the presence of the many voices residing within us —the voices in the distant past, today and future that were swallowed before being uttered, the voices barely emitted but drowned out regardless, the voices of the cries let out with its prayers, and the voices gently cast on our loved ones. Through the secret words, the various voices and languages are improvisationally traced, repeated and overlapped, and while its presence are emphasized, they quietly subside within the horizon of ‘sounds’.

Each of them resonate, sometimes repelling each other, but gradually connects in solidarity. As words become voices, and then to sounds, its abstraction and anonymity is enhanced, but through accumulation and sharing rises an ‘intimate sound / open shibboleth’.

I would like you to experience the 'sound' that echoes through the space and your body, as if it is whispered into your ears, or called from the distant to you.