Body of Strings: Vibrations and Resonances – MTO

Body of Strings: Vibrations and Resonances

The exhibition brings together echoes, vibrations, transmissions, and shared energies between Sufi thought and contemporary artistic practices.

At its center lies the setar, a lute with fragile and vibrant strings, carried by Sufis as an emblem of refinement, inner culture (letâfet in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish), and a vector for spiritual transformation. As a resonant body, the setar here becomes a metaphor: that of a vibrating heart, stretched between heaven and earth. It invites us to tune our listening to the vibratory dimensions of emotion, to the movements of care, memory, and transmission—whether human, ancestral, ecological, or invisible.

Through the gestures of listening, oral narratives, songs, rituals, dreams, or visions, the body emerges as a living space of passage: a sensitive medium where forgotten knowledge, silent voices, and encoded memories circulate. The works on display unfold at the intersection of art, care, spirituality, and sonic thought. They explore a way of listening beyond the audible.

The museum itself becomes a resonant body: a vibrating architecture, porous to the living world that surrounds it. The exhibition is anchored in the rhythms of the river, the symbolic lines of the garden, and the discreet presence of medicinal and aromatic plants. These correspondences invite us to refine our perception, to feel—through our own bodies—an embodied, situated, and active listening of the world.