Primary Human Fear no. 2 is an experiment conceived as an installation that explores the physical and emotional reaction to certain stimuli. It is believed that fear of the loss of the ground beneath the feet is one of the innate human fears (including the fear of sudden noise) and I wanted to try to awaken this fear in the audience. Maintaining the balance is a capacity that we have all perfected as children, and fear of loss of the ground beneath the feet was what drove us to become independent. Through my work in contemporary dance, I myself was confronted with dif∫culties of maintaining the balance and transmitting it through space. I think that the great majority are not aware of what a shock it is to lose the balance, and I used the heart of the individual, i.e. the pulse, as a measuring instrument to record this shock in a sonic aspect.

The visitor enters a rather cramped cabin in which, with a stethoscope, he or she can listen to his pulse; he is offered a couple of different sounds that can be used to replace the sound of the pulse, although the rhythm remains the same. What the visitor does not know is that when he presses
one of the offered sound activators, the ground on which he is standing will drop by some ten centimeters.