“Palimpsest and the Whispers of the Well”, a 2026 ten-channel holographic video installation by interdisciplinary artists Ahmet Rüstem Ekici & Hakan Sorar, and “OOZE”, a site-specific installation by architect and artist Büşra Tunç, both return to the legend of the Well of Love. Yet rather than simply illustrating or retelling the familiar story, the artists use it as a starting point for questioning what history remembers, what it leaves out, and whose voices are allowed to become part of a narrative.

For centuries, the Well of Love at Trenčín Castle has been associated with a romantic legend. In the popular story, the well is connected to the love of the Ottoman prince Omar for Fatima, who was held captive at the castle. The legend has survived as a romantic narrative, but contemporary artistic interpretation opens another layer beneath it.

“Palimpsest and the Whispers of the Well” shifts the focus from mythology towards the material reality hidden behind the story. “Beneath this idealized narrative lies a hidden history of physical labor and material endurance”, the artists explain.

The work asks viewers to look at the well not only as a place associated with love and legend, but as a site marked by effort, resistance and human labour. Its title refers to the idea of the palimpsest — a surface on which earlier traces remain visible beneath later inscriptions. In this context, the romantic story becomes what might be called the visible upper layer, while the physical traces of construction and anonymous labour remain concealed underneath.

The installation is positioned parallel to the original well. Ten holographic devices form a choir-like arrangement around the viewer, while their continuous mechanical movement becomes part of the conceptual language of the work. The motion evokes the repetitive effort that lies behind both technological illusion and historical construction.

Projected images fragment into reaching hands, passing veils and organic forms. At times they move in synchrony; at others they become dissonant. The resulting tension between harmony and disruption reinforces the work's central concern: the relationship between what appears coherent on the surface and the complex, often invisible processes that sustain it.

Through AI-generated video, generative sound and augmented reality, the installation brings together contemporary digital technologies and the centuries-old materiality of the castle. Visitors can access additional content through an AR interface activated by QR code, extending the physical installation into a virtual space.

The artists describe the result as a transformation of the well into “a site of remembrance and collective effort.”

While "Palimpsest and the Whispers of the Well" excavates the hidden material and physical history beneath the romantic narrative, Büşra Tunç's “OOZE” approaches the same legend through the question of voice. The central figure is Fatima — present at the heart of the story, yet historically denied the possibility of speaking for herself.

As the project text states: “In the legend of the Well of Love, Fatima is present yet never fully recognized.” Although the narrative revolves around her captivity, she remains largely an object within the story rather than a speaking or knowing subject.

This absence becomes the conceptual starting point for OOZE. Rather than attempting to reconstruct Fatima's voice or invent a definitive version of her experience, Tunç examines what her silence reveals about the structure of the legend itself.

The project argues that the story depends upon a figure who is prevented from speaking. This creates a contradiction at its centre: Fatima is essential to the legend, yet she is not granted full agency within it.

“Her presence does not repair the story but strains it, exposing its internal limitations,” the artist's text observes.

Tunç's site-specific installation places Fatima's presence within the castle itself, turning a historical site of confinement into what the artist describes as “a charged perceptual field.”

Here, the narrative is not presented through a conventional sequence of images or historical reconstruction. Instead, visitors encounter breath, sound, fragmented language and light circulating through the space.

Phosphorescent clusters of text appear and dissolve, resisting a fixed interpretation. Sound becomes particularly important: rather than functioning as conventional speech, it becomes something closer to effort and breath. This decision is significant. Fatima does not suddenly acquire a clear voice through the installation. Instead, the work draws attention to the conditions that prevented her from having one in the first place.

In this sense, OOZE does not seek to provide a missing conclusion to the legend. It asks viewers to consider how stories are constructed through both what is said and what remains unspoken.

As the project text puts it: “OOZE does not seek to restore a lost voice. Instead, it traces how silence continues to shape what can be told and remembered.”

Although the two installations employ very different artistic languages, they share a fundamental concern: looking beneath the surface of a familiar story.

"Palimpsest and the Whispers of the Well" turns towards materiality — stone, tools, labour, mechanical movement and the hidden traces left behind by human effort. "OOZE", by contrast, focuses on the immaterial — silence, breath, memory, absence and the difficulty of recovering a voice that history has not preserved.

One work asks us to consider what physical traces have been concealed beneath the legend; the other asks whose voice has been concealed within it.

Together, the projects transform the Well of Love from a familiar romantic landmark into a space of questioning. The medieval architecture of Trenčín Castle becomes an active participant in this encounter, allowing contemporary art to enter into dialogue with the stories, bodies and traces accumulated within the site over centuries.

The result is not a rejection of the legend, but a deeper reading of it. Beneath romance lie labour and endurance; beneath narrative lies silence; beneath the visible surface remain other histories waiting to be perceived.

In these two art installations, the Well of Love becomes something more than a monument to a romantic tale. It becomes a palimpsest of memory — a place where contemporary technology, sound, light and spatial intervention make previously invisible layers perceptible, inviting visitors to reconsider not only what history tells us, but also what it has chosen not to say.