Rather than pointing to objects existing in the world, evidence indicates or manifests an unseen[...]The art of subtraction is the art of evidencing of what is not.

J.L. Nancy, The Evidence of Film, Abbas Kiarostami

You can think about this another way: instead of silence preceding the speech that breaks it, silence is positively brought into the world through speaking, as a hole or absence that language can never abolish or “make speak,” but which forever twists and haunts that which is spoken. And one of the lessons of Kafka’s dog is that it’s from this void that one philosophizes. The dog turns silence into an object of investigation—the same silence that he is the living embodiment of.

A. Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science

In loving memory of Jacqueline Mesmaeker

Three frames were donated by Mertens frames. These frames formerly inhabited works of Jacqueline Mesmaeker.

In his story Sarrasine Balzac, describing a castrato disguised as a woman, writes the following sentence: 'This was woman herself, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive worries, her impetuous boldness, her fussings, and her delicious sensibility.' Who is speaking thus? Is it the hero of the story bent on remaining ignorant of the castrato hidden beneath the woman? Is it Balzac the individual, furnished by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it Balzac the author professing 'literary' ideas on femininity? Is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every paint of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative· where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.

R. Barthes, The Death of The Author

A note reading ‘à donner’ and on its verso a floorplan with the annotation ‘faire disparaître’. To give away and to make disappear could be one and the same action. But we lingered on the architect’s writing and its authorial instruction. 

Noting No Thing (2)
red bic ink
scale 1:1 
2022

The writing scaled to size 1:1 (according the floorplan) and applied on the wall in red pen. The work was presented by Wim De Pauw during Art Contest at Espace Vanderborght.

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never. Against the feeling of having triumphed over them by one's own strength, and the consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it, no earthly powers can resist.

F. Kafka, The Silence of the Sirens