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Two projects of the Milena principle (European organisation, based in Belgium) in cooporation with the Olivia Asssociation (Portugal) and individual artists from Portugal,  Belgium, Holland and Germany.

II. The anatomy of silence [ urban silence design ].

Our objective is to present projects with a way of creating art which does not want to explain but offers instruments of experience and feeling, different of a pure intellectual approach of understanding. Instruments of experience are in our perspective also instruments of knowledge.

In the first project the instrument is ‘taking a walk’, in the second project the instrument is ‘silence’. Both instruments work through the body, the first through moving the body, the second through listening and unfolding all your senses. These two instruments lead to perceive the reality on a different way, with more understanding, richer, slower and with more details

They are as well aesthetics and ways of perception. In this sense aesthetics is the science of perception. 

We don’t exhibit the human problems in our society, problems that are unmistakably present in our environment and in political world events. It is a way of art, which is autonomous and tries to offer alternatives, which are based on the caring for others.

Our vision of the artist is that of a homo ludens ‘a playing human being’ . This enables the artist and art to participate with the community, to discover and grow. Our projects are laboratories, journeys, searches to interiorize. This results in wanting to perceive the reality surrounding us on a interactive and dynamic way and more intense, through works of art as an end result that gives shape to these thoughts.

We share the tradition in which Joseph Beuys defined creativity. Creativity is not the monopoly of artists. Our projects depart from a broader concept of creativity. Creativity is to determine the content of life in its particular sphere, which can be in all aspects of society : from painting, engineering, health care, economy, the daily manual work of for example a baker who moulds dough. The idea of culture should not be restricted to art. The concepts of art and science should be broadened. Our projects aim to have a concept of art that is universal, which acts through an interdisciplinary nature, integrating also a broader concept of science and knowledge. 

Our projects want to interact and integrate within an urban context and space, and in cooporation with the urban community. Our projects work with concepts and guidelines as Serenity, Silence, Intimacy, Enchantment, Inspiration. In these aspects we are close to the views of artists and architects like Luis Barragan. At first sight these aspects seem far away from city life, but they are not. These concepts create a breathing space for creativity in an urban environment, as a refuge for a community to find itself again.  

In our projects nature and culture, ecology and economy, the speed of urban life and the slower pace of experiencing, enchantment and inspiration are not seen as opposite, but as complementary.

Our projects contain actual references to Alfred Dürer [1471 - 1528], Caspar David Friedrich [1774 - 1840], Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900], Joseph Beuys [1921-1986], Luis Barragan [1902-1988], Willem Schinkel [ 1976 ], ...

Participation of the community and public, interaction of the artists with the public and the presence of the artists in the city and communication with the community are part our artistic undertakings. Our art events and exhibitions are living processes of interactions and participation at a specific place at a specific point in time. The temporary nature and the intensity of our events does not have anything to do with the volatile character and transitoriness of our era. At the contrary: our events want to  create a field of timeless experience in which concepts as 'silence', 'slowness', 'the body as measure unit and as instrument for perception' are strongly present. The development of our projects is also based on a nomadic aspect, referring to the former renaissance artists, who did not only travel with their works throughout Europe, but also made connections with the places they visited.

Renaissance artists and philosophers found each other throughh their common interest for a new philosophy. Through their travels they moved boundaries, travelled with and via ideas. Through exchanges of ideas with artist-friends, whom they visited during these long journeys, they created a network of solidarity and affinity.

Renaissance artists did not only travel with their work through Europe but also made connections with all the places they visited. In the Milena we call this aspect of our activity the Dürer-connection. This includes as well a continuous exchange of ideas with foreign artists and thinkers, and also organising of and participating to international events.

The title ‘Sense in the city’ refers to our aim to stimulate a deeper dialogue on urban sense-making processes with contemporary art as a binding agent. We want to invite visitors and inhabitants to discover, perceive and experience the city with their senses as well. We aim to invite and handle instruments to the public and the inhabitants of Guimaraes to perceive the daily reality on a different way, with more understanding, on more intense way.

• artistic interventions throughout the city

• interactive actions with the community and public

• a forum for theoretical reflections from various disciplinary (including non-academic and artistical) perspectives in an European context

Our projects explicitly connect community and city with the domains of art and knowledge. Our projects are developed on location and in participation with the local community and residing artists. Our projects are laboratories and in a constant development as work in progress. For this reason we offer following list of activities and art events as possibilities and inspirations. Our art events are  living processes of interactions and participation at a specific place at a specific point in time and only work through participation of the community and public in a constant interaction with the artists. Our projects will be developed and adapted to the particular situation in Guimaraes and with and through a cooporation and contribution concerning content of the local social and cultural community. These (preparatory) interactions are an essential part of the project.

I. Promenadology / Spaziergangwissenschaft (the science of taking a walk in the urban landscape) 

A promenadologic encounter between art, city, society and science.

The title of the project refers to the German scholar Lucius Burckhardt (1925 - 2003), economist, sociologist and art historian, professor at the University of Kassel, where he created the Promenadologie or the Spaziergangwissenschaft (the science of taking a walk in the urban landscape). Since the beginning of his career Burckhardt engaged himself to obtain participation of inhabitants in town planning issues. He was as well against major changes in town planning, he defended the smallest possible interventions.  This reffered in the first place to traffic planning. He didn’t make a difference between city and nature, for him a city was a landscape. Hence his concept of walking as an urban science. Promenadology deals with the view of city in dependence on to go on foot. Walking leads to more understanding, perceiving on a richer way, slower and with more details. Promenadology ocuppies itself as well with how technology changes the way people perceive the world, but progress need not blind people to the world around them. It is as well an aesthetics and a way of perception. In this sense aesthetics is the science of perception.

The promenadology interpretes public space as a surface of the imagination upon which the wishes, interests, traditions and yearnings of a society are manifested. In the tradition of psychogeography the urban landscape is explored on an intuitive way, open for meetings and experiences. Walkers are urban nomads, they follow and describe the feelings reflected by the urban areas. The psychogeographic walkers or urban explorators reshape/redefine urban environments via the discovered emotianal atmospheres in certain areas through the creation of emotional city maps.

Walking is the easiest and most natural kind to explore a town. Our mobility has changed not only our surroundings, but also our look at the world. Walking is an instrument to knowledge, to attribute the landscape in our head, not on an intellectual way but through the moving body. This opens richer ways of understanding and comprehending which are not accessible through “pure scientific description”.  

Our project wants to initiate a border crossing forum in which the centre of interest is art, philosophy and politics as poetic, creative and human instruments. As ‘urban nomads of a new era’ we move in a field between art, philosophy and politics. Utopian views for our urban society as an unexhaustible source of inspiration.

Our project will stimulate alternative ways of moving on through the everyday area and everyday life. A symposium examines alternative types of  town perception and deals with our perception and mobility as well as their consequences to town planning.

Several approaches to look at a contemporary urban society through the eyes of an walker are presented in the document ‘Sense in the city : Spaziergangwissenschaft’ 

The event is explicitly an interbreeding between an art-event and a forum for urban and sociological issues. The locations of the event are spreaded over the city and for the symposium we choose the city-theatre/cultural centre and public spaces in the city, following the idea of a nomadic university. Approaches to the subject are ‘what if politics would become a poetical instrument?’, ‘human interest and the city’, ‘communication and alienation’, ‘society and melancholia’, ‘urban nomads’.

As a metaphor of exchange the symposium will be held in the city theatre and the cultural centre, while an overview-exhibition will be organised in the university buildings.

In this project an essential importance is given to the act of walking. Walking unites the visitor with the city and connects the different elements of the art event throughout the city. Walking is as well perceived in this project as a work of art.  Interactive and artistic walks will be made by the artists with the public and participants to the event.

Signs

 Billboards and sign-boards in several public spaces (meeting places, places where large groups of people pass walking, in shopping centers, in the streets and on market places), projections and soundscapes in public buildings, an exhibition of the Promenadology-drawings, models and writings in the university building, ...  

Interactive walks and walking lectures dedicated to city perception. An archive of the walks will be made and presented in a display of a growing library.

A route via large wooden boxes in the city in which projections/images of city- and landscapes and soundscapes are presented.

An exhibition for walkers with intimate temporary gardens reflecting utopy and poetry in the streets and on sidewalks.

A central place where visitors, participants to the ‘Sense in the city’-activities can meet, discuss, eat, drink and stay in the atmosphere of the project instead of being thrown in the completely different atmosphere of a local café or restaurant. Sponsored by companies of silent technology.

The invited participants are artists, experts and academics coming from different perspectives and background (antropologists, sociologists, artists, social workers, educators, philosophers,...). A series of discussions are held in the city theater, not at the university. Several artists will be invited to perform and to present their work during the discussion slots. The city theater will prepare a dramaturgical scenery to enhance the dialogue during the symposium. The structure of the symposium will revolve around the discussions, art interventions and many workshops for small groups.

We propose following project to promote the qualities of silence and space in an urban context. This project, in which art is the binding agent, integrates diverse disciplines and sectors, including economy, ecology, culture, welfare, education, justice and health care  in a process which is socially integrated and transgressing.

Our proposed activities are about silence as a positive state in life and society. Our project departs out of the experience and importance of silence. We define silence inspired by the phenomenology of sound as created by the Romanian philosopher and conductor Sergiu Celibidache (1912-1996).

Not the physical definition of silence, or the acoustical definition counts. The main object of our phenomenological approach to silence is how sound unambiguously works on the human being (in this case in an urban context). Silence is an instrument of experience and as well as an instrument of knowledge.  

Silence is seen as a presence in the consciousness, experienced with the senses and via the body. Our conscience has the unique ability to eliminate of all forms of duality via the ‘reduction’ and ‘transcendance’. A reduction or integration out of the differences doesn’t have anything to do with the mathematical or formal logical reconstruction of parts to a whole, but it concerns a (re)creation of an unity. The transcendental mind obtains an integration of the relations between events. Silence creates the relation between the manifestation of events, not as a punctuation or a consecutive emptiness between the things. It is a living process that keeps events together, thus time-space.

This is a view close to the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’. ‘Ma’ doesn’t have a word or term which is similar to this concept, but you could describe it as an interval which gives shape to the whole. This interval exists in time and space, which are inseperable. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words, Heinrich Boll sees himself as a ‘collector of silences’. ‘Ma’ underlies almost everything in Japanese culture and is an important component of communication. It explains the greater sensitivity of the Japanese to the silences which arrange speech, and thus to the context of any expression in which silence is integrated. Ma is an unseperable part of society and economy, even implying the use of ‘Ma’ in designing cars.

Following our views and inspired by the ideas of Sergiu Celibidache and the Japanese concept of ‘Ma’ silence is a living and human process which connects us all in our deepest way of being. Silence is connected with all domains of urban and contemporary life through economy, ecology, culture, welfare, education, justice and health care  in a process which is socially integrated and transgressing.

The project wants to realize a cultural bridge between the presence of silence as access to historical and natural soundscapes and the human inner experience of silence. Silence is not limited to a material-acoustical aspect, silence is as well a part of city life as an inner space, a breathing space.

Presented are several events and activities in the framework of our project. They are attributed to the strategical domains for Guimaraes CEC 2012

The Academy of Silence : Meetings/conference with experts from the most diverse areas about the importance of silence in their fields.  

The project wants to exchange of knowledge and experience, to stimulate competences, to bring people together who learn to work on a interlinking way and to develop methods of transdisciplinary cooporation. The goal is to stimulate concrete cooporation projects with partners from diverse disciplines and sectors, including economy, ecology, culture, welfare, education, health care, justice... in a process which is socially integrated and transgressing.

Building Silence / Quiet Urban Areas  : Workshops and conferences about silence and architecture and about silence and urban space in an European context (reffering to the Environmental Noise Directive EC (END) [2002/49/EC] in which is mentioned that competent bodies could designate Quiet Areas. For urbanized areas this is called a Quiet Urban Area, abbreviated QUA.

Designing silence / the Economy of Silence : workshops and conferences about interior architecture, silence design and the relation between silence and economy (i.e. quiet technology). 

Acoustic ecology and silence : Conferences in possible cooporation with the World Forum of Acoustical Ecology (Canada), the Forum ‘Klanglandschaft’ (Germany, Switzerland, Austria) and the Organisation ‘Hoerstadt/Acoustic City’ (Linz CEC 2009, Austria).

A declaration about urban silence as a right and essential human condition. The declaration will be written by an European Parliament of Silence, composed of a group of artists and experts from different countries of Europe. It will be proposed for consent by the City Council of Guimaraes as a City Directive after which it will be an invitation to all other European cities to join it.  

City Campaign Against Imposed Noise : participation actions against the massive presence of background music in the public sphere following the initiative of many organisations and actions across the world against piped music and imposed noise. The actions depart from the principle that silent and quiet areas in a city are a fundamentel and human right. This campaign integrates the creation of  ‘Silent Spaces’.

• Room for silence : designing/creation of interactive silent spaces in the city. In these spaces you can leave behand quiet thoughts on a strip of paper. These spaces can be imaginary as well, for example projections of clouds or huge billboards with clouds in a shopping center.

• Gestures towards silence : artistic dialogues and interactions (non manipulative interventions and soundscapes) in silent buildings (churches, study areas, museums, monuments, cellars/basements, attics/lofts, libraries, archives, hospitals, prisons, tombs).

Keepers of silence

-This project wants as well to learn how to handle on an integral, integrated and durable way with the many aspects of ‘silence and heritage’.

-The intangible cultural heritage ( traditions of silence in different disciplines and social sectors) and in the material heritage.

-The movable heritage (objects and animals) and immovable heritage (geography, landscape, buildings).

-Integrated means to absorb heritage in a broad social context and to absorb in other domains like ecology, health care, welfare, tourism, agriculture, education, ...

Whenever space is organised it is engaged in some form of acoustic design, for sound gives us a sense of the volume and interiority of spaces, and any space we create has its own acoustic character.  Sound does not obey physical boundaries as easy as for example light (for lightproofing, heavy curtains will suffice, but soundproofing is much more challenging). Spaces are not designed solely for the eyes, We see, experience and feel space with our complete body. Spaces are designed as well for the senses and in relation to the experience of silence. In these projects we look for a specific form of acoustic design : the design of silence in an urban environment.

Objective is to create and offer urban silence design projects and symbolical actions to let the community participate in creating (with) silence connecting urban space and art. We aim for a cooporation between inhabitants (children,  teenagers, students and adults) of Guimaraes and artists in residence through architecture, photography, multimedia, installations and performing arts.

Multidisciplinary social, cultural and artistic projects involving community participations and other actions dedicated to silence in society.

In 1996 the US League for the Hard of Hearing initiated the annual “International Noise Awareness Day”. Since then organisations, action groups, medical doctors and acousticians across the world have been participating to this action day (date changing every year, but end of april).

The Scottish artist, pop musician (The KLF) and publicist Bill Drummond proclaimed No Music Day in 2006, a day on which everyone should get away from the constant stream of music to become aware again of the real significance of songs and music.

-Whisper events : parties where the music is replaced by images and colors, where people communicate through whispering or without using sound and where you can dance on silent vibrations.

-Whisper fields : private and public urban meeting places / spaces / gardens dedicated to silence (exterior acoustic design, interior design, garden design, labyrinths/spirals (travel from outside to inside, concept of Nada : journey to an inner world), sound installations, haiku, visual poetry)

-Hikikomori & Urban studiolo/ Silence en marge : an art and multimedia project about seclusion – alienation in participation with the public

-The silent body / moving inwards : a multidisciplinary project for young people about bodily existence, (lost contact with) corporeality and interiorization of feelings (intensity draws a person inwards, creating silence with the body, resulting in human fields and movements).

Nightzone / Carriers of light : an night exhibition in a park or natural environment with art works made of light (in combination with public night walks/ night performances/ whisper concerts in complete darkness)

-A visual presentation of international poetry (about silence)  in the streets of the city

Sense in the City - Guimaraes CEC 2012: © the Milena principle 2010 [ Geert Vermeire, Stefaan van Biesen, Filip Van de Velde, Bregt Smeets. Logo realisation : Annemie Mestdagh & Stefaan van Biesen 2010.]

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