“Is it a thicket or an adventurous wiring construction in a megacity? Are we entering a space of silence or echoed noise?
Entering the basement of SAVVY we find ourselves in the shades of silence: In Corinne de San Jose’s „59.59“, 118 radios play an audio loop of crickets chirping, broadcast through different FM frequencies, half playing recordings of crickets in their natural habitat, the other half recordings from a farm that breeds crickets for human consumption. The installation negotiates silence and the duality this phenomenon carries with its forever counterpart, noise. It asks the question how much silence weighs and what space it can create. In the context of the tropics, silence is a precious and precarious state that one has to purposefully create, if possible to create it at all. The sound of the crickets in the installation echoes the universal cliché for silence and calmness. The radios reflect on the two different meanings of the phrase “radio silence”. Through these explorations on silence and interconnectedness, the artist is investigating questions around silence and sound and how our own personal narratives interfere in perceiving, filtering and interpreting these phenomena.”