Silence

'There is no such thing as silence' is a collaborative project done during the Art and Research Honours Program (a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam and Gerrit Rietveld academy). The project focuses on the research about the ambiguity between the states of absence and presence. This research resulted in an essay which explores our development and a series of photographs which are called to communicate the heavy feeling of being trapped inside the environment. The aluminum photo-plates were inspired by the very physical and visually aggressive presence of the soft and sound absorbing elements on the wall of an anechoic chamber: a room practically devoid of sound at the Technical University of Delft. How can such a present form make sound practically absent? Can presence be absorbed, and if it can, is it then absent or still hidden somewhere? The irony and metaphorical possibilities of these elements, as well as their physical and visually aggressive look led to these works. With them we play with the ambiguity of imposing silence onto someone, or onto an environment, thus investigating the tension between silence itself and something silenced.