Silence

‘The most precious art of our time has been experienced by the public as a movement towards silence.’
Susan Sontag, The Aesthetics of Silence

It is not just a matter of enquiring into the vast iconography of works in which we see moments of listening, in which we see ears, gazes, bodies that worry about interruptions to sound. We still need to understand the extent to which silence is a model for the gaze, a requirement for allowing the forms of the visible to take shape within us and make sense. If speech, the manifestation of an intersubjective relationship, formalises the distance between speaking subjects, silence would be what brings us closer together by leading us into the depths of subjective life. It is also what nourishes situational comedy, its value of strangeness, opening doors to the absurd, provoking the loud noise of laughter in response.
But a doubt arises: does silence exist? Against a backdrop of universal noise, down to the beating of our hearts, could silence be an ideal horizon, out of this world, at the limits of sensitive experience, a horizon by which images can be fascinated when they discover they are silent?

Each autumn, L’écarquillé brings together artists and authors around a theme. Silence is their first album.