What the Water “Kept”: Evening of Confession in Paris

An evening set upon 4 days (September 30 to October 4, 2026) of opportunity to witness a one of a kind multi-sensory ritual of sound, scent, and the tangible. Paris draws in creatives, visionaries, and those alike to invite them into the installation “What the Water Keeps” set in an architect's 3 story designed home…

Being an artist requires not only intention, but being able to step into your own flow of movement, creativity, and connection, while continuing to draw what is deep inside you out. There’s another level of flow that happens when you bring that together with six other creative women who have fully stepped into their gifts, each bringing something of their own to make one vision come to life.

From the moment you stepped foot into this space, you were greeted with kindness, compassion, and a heart to serve, not for the expectation of anything in return, but to purely show that we can receive. This narrative not only showed through the hosts’ hospitality surrounding the beauty of the space, or from the intention behind the light bites provided to the drinks served, but through the installation itself, offering a space to let you breath, giving you more then you came for, expecting nothing in return, and for you to rather simply receive.

The home that held the installation was set down the steps from the main floor, drawing you into the center of the room, where a sculptural tree stood with gold branches that twisted like roots, coming up from a mound of dark earth. Twelve Chimes, keys, and small glowing lights hung from the branches. At the bottom sat a black vessel by Jana Francke with a single orchid inside, its extract becoming part of the scent that filled the room as a top note above the petrichor accord. She trained in product and process design at UdK, graduating in 2017, and her vessel looks almost alive, like it’s holding the flower on purpose, drawing you into the smell as if earth is truly touching the water.

The evening was enchanting that fostered community and purpose | Photo Credit: Amaya Rose

Provided upon entering the home was a sample of the scent, and it reminded you of earth meeting crisp air on a fall morning after rainfall. There’s a word for that smell, petrichor, the scent released when rain meets dry earth, and the whole installation was built around drawing it out. The scent was orchestrated by Gigi Minsky and Alessia Manina, both based in Paris, who run Molecular Architecture together.

Gigi’s story is what truly drew me into the story of the evening. After later reading about her grandfather, Marvin Minsky, one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence, I was struck by the full-circle nature of her work. She grew up around a family trying to teach machines to think, yet she found herself exploring something technology still struggles to fully replicate: scent. She took a world shaped by artificial intelligence and moved in the opposite direction, toward one of our most intangible and instinctive senses.

She and Alessia, who came from biotechnology, perfumery, and luxury branding and served as the supporting perfumer, chose every molecule by hand. Only after that did they bring in AromaGen, a scent technology from the MIT Media Lab created by Awu Chen, a Research Assistant in the Lab’s Tangible Media Group, to carry it through this space, and many spaces to come. Gigi’s view is that AI can add to the art, but it doesn’t create it. The idea behind the installation is all about confession, and the retrospective wave-lengths of the creation bringing forth a space for you to truly breath. Guests can give an anonymous confession, and it gets turned into sound that plays through the chimes (each struck by its own mechanism, one note per chime across a twelve-tone scale) while sound moved around the room. It almost felt like it heard you from certain points in the room, depending on where you were standing and the energy in the space. It reminded me of a radio frequency.

In a mesmerizing way the tree responded to sound | Photo Credit: Amaya Rose

It made sense that Xiao Xiao was part of this. She’s a Paris-based Chinese-American multimedia artist, pianist, songwriter, and self-taught the reminist who has spent her career using technology to make things you can’t touch into things you can feel. She is an alumna and Research Affiliate of the MIT Media Lab and Director of the Institute for Future Technologies at De Vinci Higher Education. And Olivia Carpenter, a Boston-based mechanical engineering student at MIT who recently interned with the Institute for Future Technologies in Paris, came to this from design and textiles before moving into robotics. Every one of them brought a different gift of knowledge into one room, and one vision come to life.

That’s what I saw that night. A new way of grounding, almost like an electrified grounding. We can use technology and AI to magnify the world, and give back to it rather than have it ever takes anything at all. On one of the boards, Hanna Sipos, the Berlin-based botanical artist and founder of Studio Seraphima, and Gigi have a conversation about water and confession. One line from Gigi really stayed with me: “But perhaps confession does not erase anything.” Hanna answers, “Perhaps it simply reveals what was already there.” They keep going. They talk about how rain changes light, sound, and scent, even though we rarely look at it directly. Gigi says scent does the same. So does sound. So does memory. And Hanna ends the conversation with a question: “And perhaps so does faith?”

I read that twice. Everything in that room was something you couldn’t see, but was so electrifying and obviously there. Scent, sound, memory, art, someone else’s confession. You can’t see any of it,but you feel it so evidently. It’s almost like the world is waking up to what faith truly is. Hebrews 11:1 calls it “the conviction of things not seen.”

The women were connecting scent, technology, grounding, and healing while showing art with a deeper meaning, and I think that was the realest thing of them all. Everything was curated and designed to draw out more when you choose to lean into the discovery of the meaning, and surrender ‘confess” to what’s around you. It was all intentional, and it flowed just like the water.

Water holds powers, and when water rushes over you, you feel cleansed. That’s how the night flowed, and what the installation read to me, almost like everything had been washed over, but not erased. The world wants us to confess with the expectation for it all to be erased while the installation “What the Water Keeps” reframed that narrative. Sometimes confession has to be brought into the light first knowing what happened to us doesn’t have to be the end of our story, but the beginning.

1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” The installation called it water. I couldn’t help but think of Christ.

And I think that is where I kept seeing Christ in the middle of all of this. We can create, build, and use the innovation of technology, our gifts, our hands, our minds, and everything we have been given. Still, there are things you can’t create yourself. There are things that were already there, waiting to be confessed, surrendered, and brought out. Something unseen can become tangible through what we create. The artists were not creating from nothing. They were drawing out what had already been placed inside of them. Maybe that is what it means to receive before we create.

To recognize that the gift was already there before we ever brought it to life. It made me think about what God does in us as his children. He doesn’t always ask us to become something completely different, but he calls us to surrender enough to let what He already placed inside of us come forward. Psalm 139 says that God formed us and knew us before we were even seen. There is something about that kind of knowing that feels different from creating ourselves. Maybe that is why the idea of receiving stayed with me so much and how the whole evening felt like an invitation to stop trying to hold everything, control everything, or even understand everything, and just receive without the fear of return. 

Titus 3:5 speaks of the “washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” Washed, but not erased. Changed, but not made into someone else. The unseen becomes seen, and the hidden comes into the light. And what was already there begins to take form. When you fully step into that surrender, you begin to understand that, just as water cleanses, confession can cleanse us too. We don’t have to keep everything bottled up to please the world. We can bring what we’ve been carrying into the light, surrender it, and let God transform it. He doesn’t erase what was there. He brings it into the light, washes what needs to be washed, and gives us the freedom to become who He created us to be. I left the room thinking about how much of life is spent trying to create something new, when sometimes the invitation is simply to surrender enough to recognize what was there all along.

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