The Vault, 2025(audio installation with sculptural element)
Installation view at Villa Ruffieux, Sierre (CH), 2025
The Vault is an installation in the form of a guided meditation that critiques the socioeconomic disparities in Switzerland. As you ascend from the working-class towns in the valley to the luxury wellness resorts in the Alps, altitude becomes a metaphor for social status and wealth.
Considering how wellness has become a marker of elite identity. The meditation format directly signifies late capitalism's appropriation and repackaging of wellness practices as forms of social distinction. These practices are no longer tools for inner peace or bodily well-being, but have instead evolved into a performance of class.
The Vault adopts the familiar soothing language and tone of wellness audio guides, while layering in irony and dissonance. The voice, which emerges from within a “golden mountain,” invites the listener to enter a meditative state, exploring how wellness culture masks deeper systems of social stratification while subtly encountering markers of class privilege and exclusion. In this way, it functions as both an immersive experience and a critical intervention—a moment of reflection on how serenity, quietness, cleanliness, and purity are often structurally produced and unequally distributed.
Ultimately, by framing privilege as enlightenment, the project questions who gets to relax, who gets to ascend, who gets to breathe freely—and at what cost, and what is quietly erased in the pursuit of curated calm.
*Supported by the Culture Department of Valais, Switzerland (Service de la Culture de l'Etat du Valais)