Filippo Minelli has been busy traveling throughout asia the past couple of months. During his travels and research he was able to engage public space with a new series of installations and projects. “Geometry of Silence” is the culmination of his travels and engaging the cities he traveled. The title reflects the silence of an act where cities embrace fast paced life of a city. The contrast and subtraction of content in the blank billboard project builds on the idea of disengaging and backing away from the idea of conformity. The simple act of silence, or subtraction can lead to a larger impact then the boldest advertisement or intricate message. Our favorite portion is the geometric sculptures that are installed within cities, silent in their insitu location contrasted against once again a city with life vibrant and alive. The cold modern nature of the geometric sculptures contrasts perfectly within the environment. Another impressive series of work from Filippo.
GF
Silence is a contradictory element in our contemporary society, because it has both the meanings of presence and absence. Presence because it’s a fact, and every culture gave it a name and definition, proving that it exist in our collective thinking. But at the same time it’s also absence because silence is by definition the lack of any tangible component of auditive perception.
This double and opposite meaning of silence can be both valued in positive or negative acceptation; it’s usually perceived as a vital and intimate condition to find a hideout from time to time, but it’s also the lack of communication which is one of the greatest achievements of our contemporary society. To give silence a tangible shape through artistic medias like photography and site-specific installations is therefore a challenge, as well as a representation which can change from place to place according to sensibility, needs and perception of the people living public and private spaces.
Minelli spent two months researching in urban, suburban and rural areas of Seoul, Ansan, Incheon, Songdo and Daebudo looking for immediate elements of the landscape suggesting an idea of silence, focusing on the presence and absence of visual communication to identify silence as a way to temporary escape the mega-city lifestyle.
From that research he extracted various standard dimensions and proportions of blank advertising-billboards that he used for the creation of artworks highlighting a ‘geometry of silence’, to visualize silence as a physical shape in the landscape of the Gyeonggi Province itself.
