(Installation (Boat, soundscape, two chairs, stuffed animals, participatory website)

FLOATING DESIRE was a one-day immersive installation aboard the literature boat Epos, moored like a dreaming animal at USF Verftet during the METEOR festival.

The installation unfolded as a hushed, slightly mischievous encounter — part ritual, part séance, part collective flirtation with the future of education. Audiences stepped into a blue, velvet-dark cabin where two black leather chairs faced each other like conspirators in an intimate plot. The air was thick with faint smoke, and an ambient soundscape shimmered like water at night, gently vibrating through the floor and into the body.

A soft, disembodied voice whispered and provoked in equal measure, soothing and unsettling at once: “It’s going to be okay, but you have to contribute.” Visitors were invited to sit alone together, to rest, to feel the uncanny presence of another body, and to surrender briefly to a strange tenderness that bordered on the supernatural.

Through a QR code, participants crossed into the digital realm of Building a School, leaving fragments of desire, doubt and fantasy about what a future institution could be — part classroom, part organism, part haunted house of collective imagination.

What began as a quiet encounter inside a small, secretive cabin slowly mutated into a larger, darker question about how we learn, who we listen to, and what ghosts linger inside our institutions. For a moment, Epos felt less like a boat and more like a drifting, half-possessed academy — floating between memory, desire, and something just beyond reach.

As night fell, the installation seemed to breathe on its own, as if the school were already here, watching, waiting, and gently asking to be built.

The project was commissioned by the department of theatre studies at the University of Bergen and realized in collaboration with BIT Teatergarasjen, with support from Vestland fylkeskommune.

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