Fiber art installation

The rumor got around… The sisters of the Levât Convent apparently left the Belle de Mai district in 2016, because they no longer found the possibility of meditating, in the surrounding noise.
The silence in which their community had lived for 150 years had disappeared.

Often used as a means of coercion in places where freedom is limited (prisons, asylums, schools, etc.), silence remains negatively connoted in human relationships, or synonymous with boredom. What do we spontaneously think of a couple dining in silence?

Urban life in megacities has transformed our relationship to silence and noise: we are, more or less consciously, constantly (over-) exposed to noise, and deprived of silence.

However, silence is, according to neurologists, essential to our brain, to allow it to regenerate.

Silence today becomes a privilege reserved for the wealthiest category of the population, a luxury denied to the majority.

I personally have a “nurturing” relationship with silence, it is crucial for me to think, to let my creativity unfold, and to develop my works. I feast on it, soothe myself there, “wallow” there with delight. However occasions to enjoy the silence become far too rare to me, too.

Silence is my Fuel
Textile installation : sewing, knotting, with cotton threads on a piece of cotton cut garment that belonged to S.H.B.*, nun of Levât Convent.
September 2022
shown in Metonymie collective exhibition.

*amazing fact : I realized, when writing the text for the exhibition, that the nun had the same initials as mine.