there are many ways to be silent

"There Are Many Ways to Be Silent" is an ongoing project led by Nadia Tahoun.

The project explores the poetry that emerges when limitations are presented and questions are posed to the public.

First, a poem and meditation were written.

Through this context, the artist established the parameters within which the project will operate.

There is a tapestry at eye level to meditate on, and there is a prompt on the floor to ruminate on, requiring the audience to engage in a spiritual bow.

The question at the core of this project emerges from a poem written by Nadia, which may potentially influence, bias, or distort one's response.



This project is a collection of data points and explores the collective poetry that emerges when limitations are presented, and questions are posed to the public. The participant scans the project code on the floor near the rock. A prompt appears on their phone, and they are asked to define a wound. The responses are then aggregated and scattered across the circle in real time. Any words that have been repeated by past participants grow in size on the screen, allowing viewers to see where we are collectively in alignment and where we have different views.

Therefore, by treating grief as data and collecting both her own and others' grief, and subsequently presenting it as data, the resulting piece becomes a collaborative creation between Nadia and the audience. Mini poems arise and look different with each data entry. 

This raises the question of how both parties will perceive this collaborative endeavor. While some may assert that writing is cathartic, a process of letting go, Nadia holds a different perspective. For her, writing feels more like a haunting, but one that she needs to undertake for her own well-being.

The first iteration of "There Are Many Ways to Be Silent" premiered at the Focus Art Fair during New York Design Week in 2023.

The Build: 

The interactive component of this project takes place on a website that was built in Python by using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. 

Users were prompted to define a wound. Their answers were then aggregated and presented back to them mixed in with the answers of those before them. The more frequent a word was submitted the larger it would appear on the screen. The responses were scrubbed at the start of each day of the fair. With each response the words would shuffle with each entry and creating mini poems within themselves. If someone submitted a whole sentence, the sentence would scatter across the screen, this was to preserve the anonymity of the response and to ultimately distill the response to nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Credits

nadia tahoun - artist

adam tahoun - developer

sanie irsay - spatial designer

sophie westfall - digital designer

cesar kastro - advisor

daniel tahoun - advisor