Silence

If you blot out sound and sense, what do you understand? ( Mumon Ekai 1183 - 1260 )

The project was made with the help of an algorithm that scans speeches by people of public interest in order to find and cut out pauses made by the speakers.

Queuing up those cut out sequences they form a continuous silence.
The full project consists of the archive, the shortfilm and the media installation.

The short film is a selection of speeches that went through this process.
The media installation presents all those moments of silence and makes them
tangible through moving images and sound in space.
The Silence Archive is an ongoing database collecting silence with these technique. 

Silence begins with a line from Zen: "If you blot out sound and sense, what do you understand?" The sentence belongs to the tradition of the koan — a question that is not meant to be answered logically but to be experienced, penetrated; a spiritual paradox that drives habitual understanding to its limit. What is at stake is not a solution arrived at in thought, but a moment in which the separation between hearing, meaning, and the one who perceives begins to give way.

Silence carries this question into the realm of political speech. There, words are never neutral. They promise, order, justify, reassure, exclude; they manufacture consent or provoke resistance — they are institutional, political, careerist, ideological. They appear before cameras, at microphones, on stages, in official spaces. A political speech is therefore never merely language. It is also image, body, situation, and power. Speeches produce reality; they draw symbolic borders before those borders ever appear as real ones.

For Silence, speeches by public figures are scanned by an algorithm for pauses, and everything spoken is removed. What remains are the moments in which the voice fails. Politicians appear no longer as bearers of programs but as speaking bodies caught in apparatuses. This is what makes the silence political. It is not contemplatively innocent. It is contaminated — by power, media, rhetoric, the archive, and algorithmic selection.

Silence probes the border between speaking and not speaking. To speak publicly is to occupy space. To be heard is to exist in public space. To be interrupted, unheard, or silenced is to be symbolically excluded. Politics is not only a struggle over content but a struggle over who gets to appear as a speaking subject in the first place. The installation does not primarily show those who are silenced; it shows those who are ordinarily entitled to speak — politicians, public figures, holders of power — and extracts the silence from them. This reversal disturbs the symbolic order and withdraws from it the very thing that sustains its public power: the utterance.

An important thread leads back to Heinrich Böll's Murke's Collected Silences. In that story, a radio editor collects the stretches of silence cut from magnetic tape. Böll demonstrates, by literary means, that silence can be made audible — not as mere absence, but as a counter-sound to the endless talk. For Murke, silence is a kind of acoustic purification: in a world that never stops broadcasting, not broadcasting becomes the most precious broadcast of all. Silence carries this gesture into the present. The silence is no longer cut by hand; it is monitored, detected, isolated, and archived by a machine. The work thus also becomes a reflection on digital classification — in a present where borders are drawn not only at fences, passports, and checkpoints, but through databases, scoring systems, biometric capture, filters, categories, and automated decisions.

What emerges is an archive of the unsaid. Silence does not argue against the content; it removes the content and lets the remaining material speak. Silence asks what is left of public authority when its language falls away — and what we perceive when sound and sense are, for a moment, pulled apart.

Festivals:
Athens Digital Art Festival
Kurzfilmfestival Köln
Festival L'Europe autour de l'Europe - Paris
Black Cat Festival - Ljubljana
Festival international Signes de Nuit - Paris
Tirana Interneational Film Festival
Short Movie Club Film Festival - Minsk