Commissioned for the Cistern by renowned multi-media artist, Anri Sala, this immersive film and sound installation transported visitors into an other-worldly environment within this vast, subterranean reservoir. The work incorporated a film projected onto a massive translucent screen depicting a weathered turntable floating in a space station. The turntable played a new original arrangement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, originally composed in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany during the Second World War. The arrangement, created in collaboration with André Vida and Olivier Goinard, also references another remarkable musical event: in 1986 Ronald McNair, one of the world’s first Black astronauts to reach space, had planned to play and record a saxophone solo on board the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Watch the installation video in English here and with Spanish subtitles here.