Today amidst the coronavirus pandemic as we live in lockdown and face a global emergency, art continues to work as a repository of individual histories and human agency.
This spirit of collecting intimate memories is reflected in artist Pallavi Paul’s project Share Your Quiet. As part of Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts’ ongoing series Surviving SQ (self-quarantine), Paul is asking people to send around 10-second audio clips of the silence in their confined environments, which she collects over the week and publishes every Monday. Clips have been coming in from India, Australia, the UK, US, Belgium, and more places all over the world, and sounds range from birds chirping and machines whirring to a piano playing and a child reciting poetry. Simply, these audio clips document humanity as it is today.
“It [represents] the churning of the world. It’s devoid of all suggestions of the complex vortex that we find ourselves in,” says Paul. “And we know this is not a silence of leisure. It’s a pregnant silence, fertile, with many possibilities. Things are changing in this silence.”
