“drafts of silence” documents silence and its disturbances.
the silence that had been created by routines.
silence as repetition or absence of sound.
in our perception of time, constancy and repetition are helping us to distinguish non relevant routines from the important moments that we remember. breaking the silence defines time that is normally relative to us. restructuring the routines of society can be viewed as the disturbances that break out of the silent moment of the ongoing flow.
/ silas bieri, 2020
The original idea of Drafts of Silence is to reflect on spaces in transformation, places of development and historical industrial spaces through audiovisual art. Since March 2020 this idea has expanded to include spaces in forced silence due to the corona crisis. Drafts of Silence is just as much an audiovisual reflection as it is a document of time, capturing spaces that echoes of emptiness, whether it’s due to the development of the city and society or the hardships brought upon by unexpected and devastating circumstances.
The first artistic meeting between sound designer Silas Bieri and photographer Alexis Rodríguez Cancino took place at Malmö Photo Biennale 2017. At this event a minimalistic installation was built using sound and photographs taken at the old train workshop Lokstallarna in Malmö, which was also the place of the exhibition. Together, they created a first experiment reflecting on the architecture, history, acoustics and moods of the place. The atmosphere provided by sound design and slide projection told a story workers and their conditions working in the old welding shop. The audience left the exhibition with heads full of new visions and ideas for the future of the empty space. Drafts of Silence is developed out of this first experiment and the positive feedback of it’s audience.
The idea of the project is to give the audience a tactile experience of architecture, photography and sound that encourages reflection and ideation. The audiovisual interplay is based upon interpretation of what at a glance seems like an unusable gap. The result, an installation combining music and photography, will always be molded by the place it’s meant to reflect upon. For every new installation the artists will research the space and create a new and unique experience. Drafts of Silence is a flexible art project that finds interesting angles in any sort of place, such as an empty stadium, a closed storefront, an old train hall – or why not even a castle?