Live Your Truth at This Pop-Up Confession Booth

This article is supported by the City of Sydney's Art & About, which is bringing the 'In Search of the Truth' installation to Sydney.

As a wise woman—Oprah—once asked Lindsay Lohan, what is the truth? It's a question that's sometimes difficult to answer, but a speech bubble-shaped inflatable confession booth invites you to give it your best shot. Having traveled the world in pursuit of universal knowledge, In Search of the Truth (otherwise known as the Truth Booth) is coming to Sydney's Hyde Park this month for Art & About—and its creators are asking locals to sit inside and speak with as much sincerity as they can about any topic.

The puffy pop-up installation—part Big Brother confession room, part Candice Breitz video artwork—is the invention of Cause Collective, a group of artists whose mission statement is to "put the 'public' back in public art" by way of thought-provoking and conversation-starting community projects. As one of its founding artists Will Sylvester explains, the project began in Ireland back in 2011 and since then has toured the globe. "Its simplest idea is that it's a large inflatable speech bubble with the word 'TRUTH' written on the front of it. We invite people to step into it, and inside there's a video recording interface where they have up to two minutes to have the opportunity to say what the truth is to them, starting with the phrase, 'The truth is …'," he tells Creators.

For Sylvester and fellow artists Hank Willis Thomas, Jim Ricks, and Ryan Alexiev, the goal of 'In Search of the Truth' was initially to find and capture as many definitions and versions of the truth as possible—with the aim of encouraging total candour. "It's such a varied thing," he explains. "You go into the booth and no one's in there with you. So I'm not sitting there with a camera or anything, it's just you. And whenever you're ready, you press record on the interface and speak."

The booth is designed to keep things short and sweet, with recording equipment cutting off the speaker after two minutes. But that doesn't mean there isn't room for a bit of creativity. "You can totally just press record again," says Sylvester. "So we've had people do 5-10 minute monologues that way. It's whatever you feel."

Having taken the booth as far as South Africa and Afghanistan, as well as all over the United States, Cause Collective has amassed an incredible archive of recorded truths. As artists, they've found the possibilities of this footage to be tantalising. "We're constantly trying to figure out how to get as many of them out there as possible," says Sylvester. "So we've done short films, and a lot of times we put them on our YouTube channel. We want to get them out so people can see them."

So why is that? It turns out some truths really are quite universal. And that's a beautiful, and perhaps world-changing, thing. "It's so weird because a lot of the truths have to do with basic wants and needs. A lot of the time people ask, 'Do the truths vary around the world?'. No, they're really just people talking about who they love or what they're seeking in life. Really personal things. They're so all similar! People everywhere want security, and love, and family."

While there's plenty of opportunity for lighthearted silliness or mundane confessions of life and love, the Truth Booth can definitely get serious. "[The confession] can be something simple like, 'The truth is I love my city' but it can also be incredibly complex," Sylvester says. In fact, Cause Collective is hopeful that it can bring the communities it visits together in moments of struggle. "If there's something really political going on in the particular area we're in, people tend to really talk a lot about that. It's a moment to sound-off about any current issue."

That community aspect is really important, which is why its creators want Truth Booth to be as accessible as possible. Accompanying the Sydney booth will be a series of 22 speech bubble-shaped signs installed on light posts in Hyde Park containing truths like "I love you" and "I respect you" in all the languages most commonly spoken across the Sydney area, from Greek to Arabic. "One of the things we wanted to do was create a way to exhibit those universal truths in multiple languages, with English words on one side and the various languages on the other," Sylvester explains.

It's a difficult and brave thing to tell the truth, which is why Truth Booth feels so liberating. In the words of the project's curator Justine Topfer, "Having an opportunity to speak one's truth is actually a rare event. It's going to create an interesting portrait of the community of Sydney; an ethnographic portrait of the city."

This article is supported by the City of Sydney's Art & About, which is bringing the ' In Search of the Truth' installation to Sydney. The booth is in Sydney's Hyde park until June 18, find out more about it [here.](https://whatson.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/events/in-search-of-the-truth?utmsource=Vice &utmmedium=Advertorial&utmcontent=newspostVice&utmcampaign=AA2016-17)

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