coletivo 624 Builds a Curved Timber Listening Wall for Anonymous Confessions in a Montpellier Courtyard

Raconte-moi un secret, or "tell me a secret", is a 10 m² interactive sound installation by coletivo 624, set up in 2026 in a courtyard in Montpellier. The brief sounds simple. Members of the public record anonymous confessions, other visitors listen to them, and the growing archive of voices becomes a collective soundscape that keeps changing. Physically, it is a curved timber frame lined with rust-red fabric and fitted with small plywood boxes that you lean into to hear what strangers have said.

What interests us is how much architectural thinking fits into an object smaller than a parking space. The piece has to manage intimacy in public: a whisper has to feel private while a crowd stands two metres away. coletivo 624 does this with posture, enclosure and sound rather than with walls and doors. The curve, the height of the boxes and the softness of the fabric all work together to create a moment of secrecy inside a shared civic space. It is a small project, but it raises a serious question about what urban furniture can do.

A Curved Wall Against Stone and Ivy

The pavilion stands on cracked paving in front of a stone facade and an ivy-covered wall, and the contrast does a lot of work. The surrounding architecture is heavy, permanent and orthogonal. The installation is light, temporary and curved, and its rust-red panels are the warmest colour in the courtyard. You can read it from across the space before you understand what it does.

The curve matters more than it seems to. A straight screen would read as a barrier. An arc partly encloses the people standing on its concave side, so a cluster of listeners becomes a small audience. When a crowd gathers, the installation shifts from a sculpture into a meeting point, which suits a project built on the exchange of stories.

An Object Meant to Be Moved

One of the most telling images shows people in tan overalls pushing the pavilion across the courtyard. Whether that is staging or logistics, it shows a clear intention: this is an object that travels rather than a building that stays put. The overalls give the team a recognisable presence, closer to a touring crew than to architects stepping back from finished work.

Seen from above, the lattice roof throws a pattern of shadows over the people bent toward the viewing boxes. From the side, at dusk, the boxy wooden speaker cases show that the structure is also a sound system. The roof shades, the frame holds the textile, and the boxes hold the voices. Every element has a job, and none of it is decoration.

Listening as a Bodily Act

The best photographs show people of all ages bent forward with their faces pressed to small wooden openings in the red wall. The boxes sit at staggered heights, so an adult stoops while a child stands on tiptoe or leans in from below. You cannot listen casually. Your body has to commit, and that physical commitment is what turns playback into confession.

We think this is the project's strongest idea. Headphones on a stand would have been easier and cleaner to install. By making visitors lean into a recess, coletivo 624 isolates each listener's head for a moment while the rest of the body stays in public view. The row of bent figures becomes a small piece of street choreography, and that sight draws more people over.

Assembly in Public View

The construction images are worth looking at, not just the finished shots. Builders on stepladders raise upright posts in front of an arched doorway, and bare timber stands in dappled light beside an iron fence. The project team, including Beatriz Rosendo, Maria Eduarda Filipe, Miguel Van-Zeller and Patrícia Varão, appears to have assembled the piece on site, in full view of the street.

For a temporary installation, building in public is part of the programme. The structure is a kit of posts, ribs and bracing that a small crew can put up with hand tools. That simplicity makes it possible to dismantle and move, and it keeps the object approachable: passersby watch it being made before they are asked to confide in it.

Pine, Textile and Translucency

The material palette is restrained: pine posts and curved ribs, sheer curtains tied back between bays, rust-red fabric, and small birch plywood boxes. Burel Factory, a Portuguese wool textile manufacturer, is among the credited suppliers, so the red panels may well be burel wool, although we could not confirm it. If so, the choice makes sense, since a dense felted wool absorbs sound and gives a soft surface to lean against.

Layering does much of the work. The translucent curtains let light and garden views through, while the red fabric closes the listening zones. Against white blossom and dense foliage, the timber rib and tensioned cables read almost like garden structure, a trellis that hosts voices instead of vines.

Bolts, Hooks and Rubber Feet

The details are frankly temporary. Bolted timber joints, a hanging wire hook seen through mesh, and posts resting on black ribbed rubber feet over rough concrete show a structure that touches the ground lightly and leaves no trace. Nothing is anchored into the historic paving, which matters on a site framed by old stone facades.

There is no attempt to hide how it goes together. That honesty fits the project's subject. An installation about revealing secrets sensibly reveals its own construction.

The Hidden Wiring of a Soundscape

Before the fabric goes on, the timber base frame sits on the paving surrounded by small black speakers and tangled cables. Later, red and black wires are clipped along pine posts and run into hinged plywood boxes beside steel cords. The finished piece looks handmade and analogue, but it relies on a recording and playback network threaded through every bay.

We like that the electronics stay modest and close at hand. The hinged lids suggest easy maintenance, and the wiring follows the timber rather than fighting it. The soundscape, which grows as people add confessions, has a physical backbone you can trace with your eyes if you look closely.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan places the curved element in a square courtyard next to a street and a cluster of tree canopies, which confirms how deliberately the arc responds to its setting. The plans show a band with two rows of column squares, crossed diagonal bracing, and a wavy line running between rows of boxes, which may describe a textile or cable route. The section explains the whole project in one figure: a tall, narrow frame and a person leaning in toward a box.

The two elevations are not identical. One side has five window boxes at staggered heights, while the other has ten bracketed bays with openings at alternating heights, which suggests the two faces serve different roles or users. The axonometric sketch, with people, a dog and speech bubbles gathered around a fabric-draped tower, captures the social ambition better than any photograph.

Why This Project Matters

Temporary installations are often treated as decoration for festivals, judged on how they photograph rather than on what they do. Raconte-moi un secret is a useful counterexample. In 10 m², coletivo 624 designs a privacy threshold, a social gathering point and a piece of public infrastructure for sound, using only timber, fabric, plywood and wire. The design decisions concern the body and behaviour, not image.

For anyone working on public space, the lesson is that intimacy can be designed into open urban settings without closing them off. A curve, a recess at the right height and a soft surface are enough to make a stranger whisper. As cities look for ways to bring people together that do not depend on commerce, small mobile structures like this one show how much a lightweight, demountable object can achieve.

Raconte-moi un secret Installation by coletivo 624. Location: Montpellier, France. Area: 10 m². Year: 2026. Photography: Paul Kozlowski, coletivo 624.

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