Silence, 2023
“Silence” explores the affective potential of silence. Arriving from feminist thinkers, such as Sheena Malhotra and Aimee Carrillo, it considers silence as a place of embodied and political possibility and explores the affects and agencies that might be discovered when listening to the full spectrum of silence. As an attempt to break away from political discourses of Western culture that align silence with powerlessness, disembodiment and inaction, the entry explores Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation (1971) works as a way of re-imagining silence as transformative and integral to our embodied life and its affective contours. The analysis explores how bodily and environmental silences may serve as a space connected to both agency and resistance, where cathartic, intense, restorative, healing and connecting affects may be unearthed.
“Silence”, in Sound Affects: A User’s Guide, eds. Sharon Jane Mee and Luke Robinson (New York:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)