A*DESK website landing page (Magazine, 12 August 2019): https://a-desk.org
Below find links for the second of four short articles I wrote to be published this summer in A*DESK, a trilingual contemporary art journal produced in Barcelona. Each of these four texts revisits and reframes a previously published article from the A*DESK archive.
TEXT #2: “BACKGROUND SILENCE” BY ANNA DOT (SEPT 2017) (English)
TEXTO NÚMERO 2: «SILENCIO DE FONDO» DE ANNA DOT (SEPTIEMBRE, 2017) (Spanish)
TEXT NÚMERO 2: «SILENCI DE FONS» D’ANNA DOT (SETEMBRE, 2017) (Catalan)
With help borrowed from Ana Dot’s essay “Background Silence,” my introduction aims briefly to invert the celebrated Cagean dogma on the impossibility of silence.
Excerpt from my article:
“If read precisely, Dot’s is not a simple ethics or politics of liberatory difference. It is one that confronts the paradoxical and structural role of negation. Her essay closes: “To remain silent is a right. Personally, day by day I am less able to fill the silences of others with words of my own because I am deafened by the noises they contain.” Silence exists as the force of the negative within noise. In a time when border walls are being planned to support transnational capital, the question to ask is not if there is noise in the clamoring silence at the border. Surely there is. The question is rather: Whose noise is it really? (That is, for whom is it “noise”?) Clearly it is not the noise of the so-called noisy. In the end, the question is not simply a matter of liberating noise from silence but rather of liberating, at least conceptually, the silence from the noise. For we cannot hear noise without its determinative silence.”