The sound of Silence (ATOPIA no. 7 - 4/2005)
|  Hardly can any contemporary claim to be acquainted with silence. In the postindustrialized world, silence is probably among the scarcest goods of all. Everything pushes us to conceive silence as a deficiency: absence of language - absence of sense. How can something make sense to us for which we do not even have an organ of sense? If silence cannot be perceived for itself, it does however pervade every perception not only as the systole between two heartbeats but as the diastole, the third (unheard) beat: nothing but a point of suspension.
These third (imperceptible) scansions are not the mere foils of sound but represent a radical silence, an experience where noise itself disappears. Such a space of attention where our own activity ceases is the precondition for letting the other come to speak. “Hearing” the sound of silence – this will be the impossible but necessary undertaking for this edition, following the seemingly impracticable injunction of Japanese koan: “hear the sound of one hand clapping!” Photography: Deborah Phares (Beyrouth/Lebanon)
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The Power of Silence and the Silence of Power |
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Written by Nikita Dhawan (Bombay/Bochum)
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Starting with an analysis of the "epistemic violence" that condemns the subaltern to speechlessness and insignificance, Dhawan shows how silence can also function as a 'non-violent' technique of subversion. As a counter-discourse, it shifts focus from the traditional logocentric strategies of resistance to possibilities of subversion through listening. |
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Cage: Un viaje a través del silencio |
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Written by Carmen Pardo Salgado (Barcelona)
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The major Spanish scholar and translator of John Cage, Carmen Pardo Salgado, stresses the importance of Rauschenberg's White Paintings in Cage's progression towards the "liquid surface" of silence. According to Pardo Salgado, the composition 4'33'' ultimately leads the listener onto an opaque surface where any intention retreats behind the experience of absence. |
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Luigi Nono - Il silenzio dell'ascolto |
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Written by Matteo Nanni (Freiburg/Genova)
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Among 20th century composer's, Venice born Luigi Nono (1924-1990) is probably the one who most radically located silence at the heart of his work. Musicologist and philosopher Nanni outlines the utopian character the composer attributed to listening and argues how the political perspective is never absent from Nono's compositions - not even in his apparently most intimistic works. |
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Feeling silence. On Stephen Vitiello |
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Written by Stephen Vitiello (New York)/Fabian Goppelsröder (Paris)
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Unheard sounds are what the New Yorker artist Stephen Vitiello tries to detect within his installations and art projects. During his talk with Fabian Goppelsroeder, upon which the following portrait is based, it turned out that this effort may also be seen as a search for what can be called the sound of silence. The search for what is there, for what makes itself manifest in a stunning intensity when there is no sound nor familiar noise. |
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Written by Jonas Zipf (Paris/Berlin)
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To a deaf person, silent hands can produce a literally deafening sound. Following the echo of these "soundless voices" in the corporeal void of Samuel Beckett's plays was the aim of a French-German theatre company with both deaf and hearing actors. The assistant director recalls the salient moments of this surprising alliance between Beckett's negation of discursive speech and sign language. |
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Gary Hill o l'immagine del silenzio |
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Written by Riccardo Venturi (Roma/Paris)
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"A bare voice lies in the sand / a thousand grains of sand / a voice from the underground / a voice is losing ground / a voice is lost and found / barely a voice can be said to be heard”. Art critic Riccardo Venturi delivers a new interpretation of Gary Hill's pioneering video Mediations from 1986. |
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Written by Augustin Maurs (Berlin)
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7-THE SOUND OF SILENCE