Laura Besançon
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Loop (2025)

Loop (20205) is part of Moving with the Wind, Like Waves, a project curated by Elyse Tonna and commissioned by the Bank of Valletta Foundation.

A three-part installation (audio, photographic print on textile, wood, paint) & site-specific project at the Inquisitors Palace in Birgu, Malta.

A physical and sonic investigation into collective visitor memory and trace, that explores the overlooked narrative found within museum feedback systems, especially the guestbooks collected over the years. This work reinterprets the sedan chair's historical function - a vessel for privileged physical transport - to instead carry the emotional and mental trace of visitors who have passed through the Palace. The installation become a sort of institutional hack, replacing the usual tour with an immersive sonic tour narrating an archive of guestbook entries, overheard remarks and anecdotes - both serious and humorous. The final booth includes a recorder for visitors to close the lop and leave their own sonic trace.

As with other projects, I often am intuitively drawn to communication tools which end up being part of the process or the work. Typically, a guestbook sits at the end of an exhibition…a quiet, peripheral object meant to capture the visitor's "thank you" or "nice work." It is the commentary on the art. In this project, I pull the guestbook from the exit and puncture it through the space / placed it at the centre of the work. Treating the mundane, the accidental, and the "unofficial" traces of past visitors not as feedback, but as primary source material.

Thank you Heritage Malta for allowing me to research the guestbooks which span quite a few years.

 Loop (2025) is part of Moving with the Wind, Like Waves, a project curated by Elyse Tonna and commissioned by the Bank of Valletta Foundation.

A three-part installation (audio, photographic print on textile, wood, paint) & site-specific project at the Inquisitors Palace in Birgu, Malta.

A physical and sonic investigation into collective visitor memory and trace, that explores the overlooked narrative found within museum feedback systems, especially the guestbooks collected over the years. This work reinterprets the sedan chair's historical function - a vessel for privileged physical transport - to instead carry the emotional and mental trace of visitors who have passed through the Palace. The installation become a sort of institutional hack, replacing the usual tour with an immersive sonic tour narrating an archive of guestbook entries, overheard remarks and anecdotes - both serious and humorous. The final booth includes a recorder for visitors to close the lop and leave their own sonic trace.

As with other projects, I often am intuitively drawn to communication tools which end up being part of the process or the work. Typically, a guestbook sits at the end of an exhibition…a quiet, peripheral object meant to capture the visitor's "thank you" or "nice work." It is the commentary on the art. In this project, I pull the guestbook from the exit and puncture it through the space / placed it at the centre of the work. Treating the mundane, the accidental, and the "unofficial" traces of past visitors not as feedback, but as primary source material.

Thank you Heritage Malta for allowing me to research the guestbooks which span quite a few years.

The audio files pertaining to each booth will be uploaded shortly