Il silenzio è cosa viva
“We return to silence, as to a place known to all, since time immemorial. A
room where silence reigns is a place where we learn to notice what is
already there, not to overlook it, not to fear it, but to move forward with confidence
into the unknown.
The room helps, it is always there, the same, one evening we are
desperate, another happy, we tell ourselves that it is fine, we tell ourselves that it is
bad, the room remains."
Chandra Livia Candiani
There are places where the gaze falters, where light withdraws into itself and the outlines of things dissolve. The book unfolds in this in-between: trees bending into shadows, objects assembled in precarious balance, a room that remains still while the mind drifts elsewhere. The camera does not record, it fractures; it does not preserve, it disorients.
Images of the outside alternate with fragments of the interior, as if each space were a mirror of the other, each carrying traces of what cannot be entirely spoken. A branch darkens into abstraction, a bedside table becomes an altar, time is suspended in the distance between silence and noise.
Silence here is not resolution, not calm. It is a terrain both familiar and estranged, known to all yet rarely entered. It unsettles, it slips into distortion, it demands an attention that is no longer habitual. What appears is not revelation but a slow unravelling, where presences blur into absences, and what is intimate becomes porous, unsettled, fluid.
The work does not seek to resolve this tension. It lingers, instead, in the uncertainty—where forms hesitate, where shadows carry weight, where listening becomes almost impossible. In these images, silence is not an answer but a question, an unstable ground on which perception bends and thought begins again.
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“We return to silence, as to a place known to all, since time immemorial. A
room where silence reigns is a place where we learn to notice what is
already there, not to overlook it, not to fear it, but to move forward with confidence
into the unknown.
The room helps, it is always there, the same, one evening we are
desperate, another happy, we tell ourselves that it is fine, we tell ourselves that it is
bad, the room remains."
Chandra Livia Candiani
There are places where the gaze falters, where light withdraws into itself and the outlines of things dissolve. The book unfolds in this in-between: trees bending into shadows, objects assembled in precarious balance, a room that remains still while the mind drifts elsewhere. The camera does not record, it fractures; it does not preserve, it disorients.
Images of the outside alternate with fragments of the interior, as if each space were a mirror of the other, each carrying traces of what cannot be entirely spoken. A branch darkens into abstraction, a bedside table becomes an altar, time is suspended in the distance between silence and noise.
Silence here is not resolution, not calm. It is a terrain both familiar and estranged, known to all yet rarely entered. It unsettles, it slips into distortion, it demands an attention that is no longer habitual. What appears is not revelation but a slow unravelling, where presences blur into absences, and what is intimate becomes porous, unsettled, fluid.
The work does not seek to resolve this tension. It lingers, instead, in the uncertainty—where forms hesitate, where shadows carry weight, where listening becomes almost impossible. In these images, silence is not an answer but a question, an unstable ground on which perception bends and thought begins again.
25x20cm - 22 pages - hardcover with cloth binding and embossed image
coptic binding
April 2022