[artinfo] ATOPIA 7 (The Sound of Silence)

[ealloa]

ATOPIA newsletter (http://www.atopia.tk)

April 2005 ..:: nomadic e-zine for philosophy, literature, arts and 
politics ::..

ATOPIA 7: The Sound of Silence

Hardly can any contemporary claim to be acquainted with silence. In the
post-industrialized 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 =96 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!"

Uberlegungen zum Klang der Stille
Ute Guzzoni (Freiburg)

The possibility of thinking silence and nothingness has been a central
question in recent work by Ute Guzzoni, philosophy professor at Freiburg
University. In an attempt to approach the aporia of the Sound of silence
for ATOPIA, Guzzoni suggests an itinerary through poetic images and
pictorial examples as well as through the thought of the later Heidegger.

The Power of Silence and the Silence of Power
Nikita Dhawan (Bombay/Bochum)

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.

Un viaje a trav=E9s del silencio
Carmen Pardo Salgado (Barcelona)

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.

Luigi Nono - Il silenzio dell'ascolto
Matteo Nanni (Freiburg/Genova)

Among 20th century composer's, the Venetian 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.

Feeling silence
Stephen Vitiello (New York)
Fabian Goppelsroeder (Paris/Berlin)

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.

Lautlose Stimmen
Jonas Zipf (Berlin/Paris)

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
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