Tag: communication

Tiqqun, from Sonogram of a Potential (full text here )

The very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communication. To be means to communicate. Absolute death (non-being) is the state of being unheard, unrecognized, unremembered…. To be means to be for another, and through the other, for oneself

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Rebecca Horn

Tower of the Nameless

1994

Ladders, violins, motors, electronic components

Private Collection, Vienna, Austria

“The breakup of Yugoslavia and the resulting Bosnian War led to the displacement of a massive quantity of people. Many refugees fled into Vienna, and soon the underground was filled with listless wanderers who did not speak German or have any semblance of a home to return to. With no identity, grasp of the language, or place to stay, music become the refugees’ only way to express their shared sorrow. Horn created this piece in hopes of offering stability to a nameless and lost people. The sculpture is composed of several ladders extending from the ground and up to a very high window, adorned with nine mechanical violins that play a single, mournful note on their own. It is as if they sing of some kind of bittersweet hope of what might lie at the top of the ladder and out into the sun. The melancholy humming of the violins has been known to inspire buskers to improvise along with them”

Source: artelectronicmedia.com

The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves, but providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people from expressing themselves, but rather, force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, or ever rarer, the thing that might be worth saying.

Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (via socialclaustrophobia)
Source: pussy-strut