PARTICIPATORY INSTALLATION

Adagio in Celadon, 2026

Outdoor participatory Installation, mixed media, collected materials, and sound piece, size variable

By Michael Hoi Ming Du & Hedy Leung

On Healing: Adegio in Celadon

PF25 cultural projects, Dornach, Switzerland

Outdoor participatory Installation - adegio in cadelon

"Adagio in Celadon" - a participatory outdoor installation by Michael Hoi Ming Du and Hedy Leung constructs a temporary ecology of receiving through sound, body, and organic material developed between Ikebana and sound practices. Rather than defining healing as outcome or narrative, the installation proposes an environment in which the body can experiment with gravity, rest, and surrender.

This work approaches healing as an inquiry rather than a prescription. It offers a space in which the body may attempt something: to be heavy, to fall, to be received. Emerging from a reflection on trust and bodily surrender, the installation draws on the experience of growing up in a place where snow never came, where the sensation of surrendering one’s weight to a soft, receiving ground existed only as a mediated image.

Encountering snow later in life as a sound-absorbing and perception-altering surface became a formative experience. In such environments, movement becomes audible and the body registers its weight differently. Does sensory perception become heightened? How might such a condition be constructed through local materials?

The installation proposes a transposition from snow to leaves: from cold, solitary, and mediated experience to a warm, collective, and seasonal material field. It draws on the idea that the ground is not inert but receptive; to lie down is not passive, but an exchange between body and surface.

Extending principles of Ikebana into spatial and bodily composition, the installation operates through relational placement: leaves, bodies, sound, and space form a shifting environment activated through collective presence. The public becomes participant and co-composer of the work.