The radical gestures of sound experimentation have been, simultaneously, noise and silence. In both, space is occupied. It is like a way of pursuing the search to clear away two opposite paths that lead to the same point. Silence expresses the absolute possibility of the incident, of what is about to come. It breaks down into a variety of contradictions and fragmentations, facing the impossible event of fully existing. In Spanish the word “sigilo” (stealth) is synonymous of silence, but it adds an overtone of caution and secrecy, when immerse in it, it refers to, a reticent action. Caution is to wait, it is the expectancy of something that is about to happen. In this way, the relationship between noise and silence is not a dichotomy but rather different forms of the way sonority dwells within, but each of these forms implies the existence of a subject, of someone who participates in the phenomenon and the aural act.
When we move this sound relationship to the social life, it acquires other characteristics. In an urban life, noise sizzles everywhere, there is no rest, it is the rhythm of the capitalist production of the city that does not sleep and refuses to be quiet, and falls into a collective muteness. Noise is also used as a visual metaphor to talk about incessant information, the speed of movement and economic circulation. But at the same time the noise, the scream, is the historical symbol of a social protest, of the amplified voice of the whole.
In this piece called Reticence (2017), Israel Martínez leads the public towards a reflection on the paradoxical relationship between noise and silence, the surreptitious and interspersed paths of auditory manifestations. He provides a twofold presentation: as a metaphor for social life and at the same time as a proposal of aesthetic nature, where the subject is the matter of the endeavor. The philosophical aphorism with which the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes the Tractatus Logicus-Philosphicus, "About one can not speak, one must remain silent", has a mouth to mouth communication, or rather a of a mouth to an ear communication in a chain. But this message chained by the voice and the whisper stops when someone decides to break the sequence. Someone using his/her own will decides to stop. The message is cryptic, it refers to the situation itself and not to something external, "the medium is the message". What is it that subject that we can not talk about? What is that issue that remains unexpressed? What does this silence mean, what attitude does it summon us to? The message only contains a dictum and its result is silence. In this way, Martínez advances towards the aesthetics of stealth, a message and a form that lead or suggest an action, the inscription of silence. Simultaneously, a vinyl record has the same phrase engraved in transparent letters and the repetition of the message is in its rings. The vinyl record with its in its 45 rpm is a mute object if it is not reproduced. However, it carries the message, it becomes a latent object until it is operated and set in motion in the repetition of a message at the limit of the audible environment.
The assertions of this piece are explained in the performance Stealth and murmur (2017). In this act the performers sleep with a megaphone. When they get up and get together they do not use the megaphone but the secret, they share it with the spectators that are present. They use murmur to transmit what otherwise would be impossible to hear. It is about the death and the violence in which we live, at the same time, about the forgetfulness of the successive violence, its aberrant ordinariness and our habituation to it. However, history and memory arise as a scream and as a murmur, while both exist in the individual and the collective body. The megaphone, which is useless in this action, represents the scream, while the secret represents that memory which is impossible to avoid. It opens a space to a new chain which is different from that of the piece called Reticence, it opens the possibility of a community where bodies and feelings appear. The quiet listening is what allows the message to be pronounced and, therefore, heard. The way in which computer hackers dismantle and break, without traceable evidence, into the most impenetrable codes, stealth appears as a political action that manages to get into the smallest spaces of speech and the ever prevailing noise, placing it where it does not want to be heard.
