Quiet, too quiet, but not silent

In the summer of 2018, Mike and I performed the participatory spatial sound work Quiet, too quiet, but not silent within five interconnected vaulted cellars under the old Conde-Duque headquarters in Madrid – a vast municipal building in the centre of the city that now houses the Condeduque Centre for Contemporary Culture.

As with our previous work What if everything we know is wrong?, the event of Quiet, too quiet, but not silent built up an act of direct public representation, engaged without metaphor and without formal or technical assumptions, to evoke and perform a social space of possible encounter – through the experiential reconstruction of geographical places where we were not: places of shared absence, built through spatially activated fragments of sound and description. 

Mike and I have always been interested in places of human absence: those places we have abandoned, where we don’t want to or can’t live, where we can’t get to, where we are not allowed, where it is better not to be, or simply where we are not. In this particular instance, we wanted to open a space in which our imagination might move between the near and the distant, to build a deeper sense of the ‘here and now’ in relation to a distant and imagined ‘beyond’. We wanted to propose that ‘distance’ as a field of action, where the relationships between where we are and where we are not might be amplified through a performed focus on those places. Places that, in fact, exist only in our absence – and where, in our imaginings of them, we might begin to recognise ourselves within a situation that far exceeds our immediate surroundings.

As David Toop (2010) says: “The aerial nature of sound always implies some degree of insubstantiality and uncertainty, some potential for illusion or deception, some ambiguity of absence or presence, full or empty, enchantment or transgression.”

A performed spatial sound work co-created with Mike Brookes

A project commissioned as part of Dame Cuartelillo, a site-specific performance programme curated by researcher Diana Delgado-Ureña and artist Jaime Vallaure. Photos by Andrea Sánchez and Mike Brookes.