Silent Walk: Between What’s Here and the Process of Becoming Intimately Acquainted

Vivan Caccuri 

Translated by Miguel Carvalho and oiginally published in Revista poiésis 25 (July 2015): 81-90. This republishing follows the version in Going Out – Walking, Listening, Soundmaking, 2022, edited by Elena Biserna and published by umland, Brussels. 

From an absolutely personal perspective and looking for a bit of debate, I would like to say that places are people. Places, by which I mean the physical spaces to which we ascribe function or meaning, have personality, behaviour, history, and communication skills which are sometime not very tangible. Extroverted places, naturally populated by people, not only welcome their visitors but desire them to be free. Shy places, even if at first glance one can traverse them, require some persistence, be it observational, investigative, or simply several visits to get to know them more deeply. Violent places have an inordinate layer of history that inhibits and terrifies us: the promise of pain, for as long as we might stay, surrounds us like an alarm and prevents any interaction that depends on any instinct other than survival. In other words, each place has its own character and approach.

 

What can we say about the voices of these places? Their typical sounds? Here, I am focusing more on how they sound, and not exactly on what they say (the content): acoustics can be one of the main entryways to unveil the visceral nature of a space, the acoustic behaviour that modulates the affections of individuals and groups. The acoustic character of a place returns the sounds that resonate within it with a new face and possibly other levels of meaning. The meaning is ascribed by the subject, the one who witnesses or lives the phenomenon, and what is most instigating for us here is to keep in mind that the acoustics phenomenon occurs in two spheres that are distinct but also held together the whole time: the individual and the collective. In this sense, it reminds us of À l’écoute (“Listening”) by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, a great effort to explain the phenomenon (any physical phenomenon) through systems born from the nature of listening, going, according to him, against the flow of the history of European philosophy, which is traditionally tied to visual and analytical strategies: 

 

“Listening aims at – or is aroused by – the one where sound and sense mix together and resonate in each other, or through each other. (Which signifies that – and here again, in a tendential way – if, on the one hand, sense is sought in sound, on the other hand, sound, resonance, is also looked for in sense.) […] But the sound of sense is how it refers to itself or how it sends back to itself [s’envoie] or addresses itself, and thus how it makes sense. […] Listening [is] the sharing of an inside/outside, division and participation, de-connection and contagion. […] Moreover, the sound that penetrates through the ear propagates throughout the entire body something of its effects.” (1)

 

Grasping the being – or the truth – of the phenomenon is impossible for Jean-Luc Nancy without searching for it in the echoes, the reverberations, the muffling, the constraints that sound and its meaning provoke in each other. It is in the distortions, in the prologing, in the flattening, and not in the purity, where the being can be understood. It is in the how of the way things sound that the face of a possible truth emerges. Such is the nature of resonance, it is like a body. In my conjecture “Are places people?”, reinforced by Nancy, the places that resound are like a settlement of bodies with which we affectionately connect. One might think of it as a big orgy of sorts. 

 

A Day of Variety

I would like to go into some examples of how this happens in practice, concluding with the project to which I have dedicated myself since 2012, the Silent Walk. In this activity, which has a duration of eight hours, I gather around twenty people for an urban walkabout whose itinerary has been previously determined by me. As its name implies, the walk is done under a vow of silence, leaving the participants in state which is very different to everyday urban behaviour driven by capital (by which I mean travelling within the city to go to work, for consumption, for leisure mediated by consumption). We visit a series of places which possess the most diverse acoustic characteristics (alleys, terraces, basements), places that produce sound (engine rooms, nature), or where some kind of performance commonly or potentially occurs (religious spaces, forums, auditoriums, backstage areas). Considering that, ever since the Industrial Revolution, the day has been pragmatically divided between work, leisure, and sleep, I thought that a walk could occupy the space reserved for work, in order to bring about a more radical detachment from the ordinary day for those who participate. 

 

The walk has already taken place in various cities such as São Paulo, Niterói, Valparaíso, Riga, Helsinki, and the Amazon (starting in Manaus), but it began and is mainly centred around Rio de Janeiro, the city where I live. I believe the Carioca capital is responsible for inspiring devices that I now use wherever I take the project, the main one being the pausing the specific places to do nothing, in an attitude towards public space that would be completely anti-utilitarian, were it not for my enthusiasm for finding the right places to sleep in public. 

 

The third Silent Walk, held on 28 May 2013, was especially striking as it provided a variety of contrasts and environments where it was possible to experience the acoustic characteristics of the spaces, their relationship with power and with sense of the social order. Picture this sequence of events:

1. The group meets in Largo da Carioca, in central Rio de Janeiro, where there is a good concentration of pedestrians and street performers. One of those performers is a man in his late sixties equipped with a wireless microphone and holding a box. He offered (free of charge) messages from God written on small pieces of paper. His voice echoed tranquilly through the square. This person was tolerant.

 

2. We head towards the enormous building of the Brazilian Development Bank, the BNDES. After the initial bewilderment caused by the silent group in the reception area, the head of security begins a guided tour through the different floors, taking us to the lift motor room and the helipad. On the rooftop, some of the participants lie down on the helicopter landing site markings. After that, we are taken to a large meeting room with mirrored glass windows through which we can only see in from the outside. The massive central table is covered with microphones and intercom systems. Next to this environment is the office of the presidency, or rather President Dilma’s office. The moment the door closes, the silence is most profound. Nothing can be heard from the outside, so as to safeguard state secrets. From up where this office is located, looking down towards Largo de Carioca is almost devastating, as the sense of power and influence over ordinary life threatens every thought. This person was veiled. 

 

3. We leave the BNDES and straight away enter the Santuário de Santo Antônio, a gold-covered landmark that stands where the sea originally reached the edge of downtown Rio. Next to the church, a chapel was packed with the faithful who were singing and praying. Our silent group immerses itself among the faithful inside. I know that there were a few participants who experienced a silent confession through the act of writing, and through the intervention of the mediators who spontaneously volunteered. This person was overflowing.

 

4. At the end of the afternoon, tired, we stop inside the restaurant area located in the basement of the Modern Art Museum, next to a gigantic air-conditioning structure built in the 1950s. Many closed their eyes, some slept with their heads on the tables, while the incessant sound of the artificial waterfall that cools the systems refreshed the already overused ears. This person massaged you.

 

Every walk ends with a dinner especially prepared for the occasion. During this final celebration, speaking is once again allowed, and this is when the participants comment on their memories and experiences. What I heard in their accounts on these occasions showed me that many of them related to the spaces with an almost humanised empathy. From the beginning, I identified with this attitude, and started to adapt my actions and treat the spaces with the civility that a human being requires or with the informality that is necessary to be persuasive.

 

Swimming in Noise

Since the first experiments that helped me find the current configuration of the walk, it was clear that abolishing oral communication would serve as a shortcut to find those “people” – the typical sound of a place – by openly entering the spaces to listen to them. Try it out in practice: it is easy to observe how the word serves as a small “escape”. Groups walking in the street are often chatting, forming an interpersonal linguistic enclosure within a larger environment: the urban public space. Heading out to listen to various of the city’s spaces while chatting about something made little sense to me. I needed a “bond”, a “glue” that would give integrity and density to the acoustic experience: this glue is the abolishment of verbal language. So, breaking down these fences that language imposes in the experience of what is outside was, for me, a way of inviting other people, the people-places and the phenomenona into the circle of the twenty people participating in the walk.

 

The brain, unhindered by the need to produce words acclimates itself to other activities, and, here on the Silent Walk, I dare say that the brain finds comfort in observation, in listening, and in extra-verbal communication. The Manaus businessman Ives Montefusco, a participant in the Amazon rainforest walk, spoke of how active his memory become, vividly placing him in events which had occurred thirty or forty years before. Hence, I can also say that the silent state opens up more space for the function of memory and, consequently, for the generation of new ideas, since it is often in the clash between old interpretations and new perceptions that innovative ideas emerge. 

 

Refuge amidst Chaos

We are used to thinking that reality is a veil that will one day tear. In this idea that reality is a temporary veil, our lack of wellbeing owes itself solely to not having yet achieved what we desire, not having yet attained the professional status we dream of, not having yet reached the ideal we strive for, or the physical shape, or the dream hime/car/partner: in short, not having yet appeased our ambitions. Conquering all desires would neutralise these daily dissatisfactions, the veil would be torn, and a full and truly powerful/beautiful/interesting/just life would then become the new norm: the “premium reality”. A blissful delusion, for the barrel of desires and dissatisfactions is bottomless. 

 

Despite being certain that any aesthetic work is in itself an antidote to the precarisation of the consciousness of reality, a way of trusting what is here, I believe that it is on account of this “idea that something exists beyond” that we use the city, the public space, and our ears (and senses) in a way which is so utilitarian and contributes to this precarity. Public space in Brazil is a place for passage for street dwellers, for sex workers, for street vendors, for crime, for chaos. In the utilitarian way of thinking, what is here is no good, what really matters lies beyond, beyond the reach of the common man. The aim is therefore to “differentiate oneself” in order to find one’s personal El Dorado and waste as little time as possible with all the ugliness that is the city. 

 

Meanwhile, we shut ourselves away in a mechanical life of very little creativity, interest, amazement, or unpredictability. Social contact, nowadays increasingly reduced to isolated bubbles by social networks, is progressively reduced to people who want or believe in the same things as us, who belong to the same social class or race as us, who share our aesthetic judgement, stifling the possibility of a socially diverse life.

 

My experiment with collective silence is far from resolving these structural problems. I understand how partial my reach is, that it is not radically diverse, and that it is dependent on the same structures such as social media, that isolate us. Still, I find in it a challenge which is mixed in with comfort, a kind of trial of what could be an alternative way of behaving:

1. The twenty people normally don’t know each other, and yet they spend eight hours in close proximity and in silence, i.e., in an anonymous and intimate state.

 

2. Without words, the social weight of questions such as “What do you do?” and “Where do you live?” is absent, thus allowing for a sense of horizontality. 

 

3. The aim is to open the body up for the encounter with the place-people, for an intimate acoustic involvement, to swim in the sound and in the situation that is here.

 

4. Often, “that which is here” is nothing special or promising. It is merely a relatively empty shell onto which the subject can project whatever they wish, focus on whatever they want, wander wherever they desire. 

 

Humanising through listening, diving deeper through silence, is the exercise that I have had the pleasure of carrying out with all the people who have already turned up for the walk in ways that transform and collectivise them, increasingly breaking free of the reins of the excessively rational control of time and space. As long as reality shows little or no suspicion that it is but a temporary lack of wellbeing, I would like always to remain outside of the walled-off circles that have been and shall be built within it. Preferable, in the company of others.

 

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References:

Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 7-14.