Silence

“Silence” is rooted in a line from Zen Buddhism: “If you blot out sound and sense, what do you understand?” The line 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. Understanding here does not come through thought, but in a moment in which the separation between hearing, meaning, and the perceiver begins to dissolve.

The work 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, partisan, careerist, ideological. They are spoken before cameras, into 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 physical ones.

An algorithm scans speeches by public figures for pauses and removes everything that is spoken. What remains are the moments in which the voice falls silent. Politicians no longer appear as bearers of political agendas but as speaking bodies caught in the apparatus. This is what makes the silence political. It is not an innocent, contemplative silence. It is contaminated — by power, media, rhetoric, archives, and algorithmic selection.

The piece 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 deprives those in power of the very thing that sustains their public authority: the utterance.

An important thread leads back to Heinrich Böll’s short story “Murke’s Collected Silences.” In it, 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 counterpoint to 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” transposes this gesture into the present. The silence is no longer cut by hand; it is scanned, detected, isolated, and archived by a machine. The work thus also becomes a reflection on digital classification — at a time when borders are drawn not only by fences, passports, and checkpoints, but also 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. The work asks what is left of public authority when its language falls away — and what we perceive when sound and sense are, for a moment, blotted out.

Installation 2026 Kunsthafen Köln / co3

Shortfilm 2020 on 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