Water and silence

The installation Water and Silence is offered to whoever wishes to look at it, read it, listen to it or think about it, as an open proposal, where the different languages that make it up, arise and participate in the same idea that unites them and grants them genetic unity. Thus, the visual aspect, the poetic-textual aspect or the musical-sound aspect, cohabit imbricated in a fabric that connects them and gives them meaning within the whole. Each element will need this context if it does not want to lose its own nature and become a piece deprived of its raison d'être. For the piece to achieve its purpose, the concurrence of readers who walk among its words and sounds, and of walkers who aspire to read its furniture, is absolutely necessary. It is, then, through the establishment of this symbiotic relationship that the reader-walker will be able to perceive, among other things, how the unintelligible and capricious arrangement of the stars high in an artificial night sky is permuted, in the depths of their own reflection, into legible and revealing order. Next, we will try to sketch a possible itinerary for the reader-walker. The reader-walker enters the space where the installation is located, finding himself, firstly, before a luminous sign (The Threshold-Silencer) crossed on the floor and where the sentence "Respect the silence of the speculators" appears. Maybe a bait to stimulate him to cross in silence the border that separates two spaces with opposite ontological quality (the exterior world and the interior world of the installation itself) or perhaps himself towards the outside and himself towards the inside? Once he has crossed The Threshold-Silencer and, consequently, accessed the interior space of the installation (The Observatory Enclosure), the reader-walker will find himself in front of a sort of table-cage (The Reading Table) whose upper area is covered with water. Just above The Reading Table, hanging on the front wall, the reader-walker will be confronted with four luminous signs (The Mute Universe) whose words are inverted. The reader-walker then observes the reflection of the words in the water of The Reading Table and notices that thanks to this inversion, the reading of The Mute Universe is made possible, in whose new enclave it acquires the name of The Sermon of the Stars. The reader-walker reads, firstly, the sentences of the two upper signs: "To speculate is to contemplate the universe with a mirror of water" (the memory of an archaic astronomical technique, the description of the reader-walker's own act or a proposition that invites to the attainment of Silence through abandonment?) and "Reading is to pierce one's own mind with intruding minds" (the definition of his own reading action reflected in the water, or perhaps a formula for restoring the quality of the evident to what is clearly presented as mysterious?). Next, the reader-walker reads the sentence "Water: support of appeared signs" (a metaphor of the infinite and tolerant space-continent, or simply an allusion to the page where The Sermon of the Stars is written?) After which, and to finish this part of the journey, he approaches the reading of the fourth and last sentence: "Silence: wall against the illiterate storms" (an intimate dwelling that protects him from the reductionism of the new oracles, or perhaps an alienating inner state capable of actualizing his most subtle powers?). Then, the reader-walker will turn around and get ready to leave the Observatory, but not before facing again the Threshold-Silencer, on whose second slope the word silence is written three times in a row, perhaps as an insistent reminder to never forget the only possible answer to the Question of Questions?