Instrumentos de silencio explores the tensions and resonances between hearing devices, inscription techniques, and processes of cultural syncretism in the encounters between the Americas and Europe. Through a constellation of works by brother-and-sister art duo Gonzalo and Susana Silva—combining paper cut-outs, 3D printing, UV printing on steel, and digital collage—it examines the ways in which music, as a technology of memory and writing, articulates genealogies of conquest, resistance, and cohabitation. Memory is externalized through technical objects, and it is through them that we construct the narratives that give meaning to our past, shape our reality, and allow us to imagine possible futures. Codex notations, magnetic tapes, zoomorphic whistles, mechanical instruments, and early computers all act as vessels where musical practices are transformed into knowledge. Colonization, among other catastrophes, brought the disruption of technical traditions, leading to the atrophy of memory and the loss of the capacity to represent the future.
The exhibition approaches the interweaving of cultural matrices not as fusion or hybridity, but as the coexistence of contradictions. It is not about denying the parts or seeking a synthesis, but about acknowledging the ongoing struggle within our subjectivity: between the indigenous and the European, between innovation and tradition, between the individual and the collective. Pre-Columbian musical artifacts engage in dialogue with medieval European manuals, and between its perforations, imaginary scores reveal layers of exchange, violence, and appropriation that do not dissolve into synthesis but persist as active frictions. Instrumentos de silencio presents itself as an essay on plurality, on disarticulating inherited logics, and on creatively embracing the coexistence of elements in tension. It proposes a speculative archaeology of musical memory: an exploration through silences, fragments, and hybrid objects that do not seek to restore an origin, but to activate a critical listening to the traces technologies have inscribed upon bodies, territories, and cultures.
Curated and sponsored by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts, organized by Deidre Green, Assistant Professor of Latter-day Saint/Mormon Studies at the GTU.
Join us for an Opening Reception in the Library on Thursday, September 11 from 5-7pm
Image credit: Territorio sonoro, Gonzalo Silva
