A collection of artworks concerning silence unfolded in a remarkable villa.

Festival Nieuwe Grond was an international festival for performance, live art, fine art, politics and society. It concerned a pilot. I took the visual arts for my account and chose to approach the exhibition from the theme of silence. This topic is meaningful to the various disciplines that the festival covers. I selected artists and works of art concerned with this theme in different ways: economic, social and psychological. Silence! wasn′t only tranquil and consecrated. In the way that colour does not exist without light, silence does not exist without the counterparts of sound and movement.

Spanning the various rooms of the villa the artworks gave meaning to silence in an associative way. In her film ′Secret Strike′ Alicia Framis froze all employees at the Head Office of Rabobank Netherlands. IEPE immobilised the busiest intersection of Tokyo in his performance. Other works explored mental silence. Matthijs Bosman created a memory by bringing visitors under hypnosis. Sachiko Abe withdrew into the attic and cut wafer-thin strips of white paper in contemplative silence, an attempt to expel unrest in the mind and to get a grip on reality. In this compact exhibition there was much to see and experience. Silence! offered a varied range of artworks, of existing work and commissioned art (Sachiko Abe, Matthijs Bosman, Nathalie Bruys and Sanja Medic), of Dutch and international artists. Despite a limited budget a fully-fledged exhibition with international artists was created.