Georgia Aliferi

Considering that we were a group of deaf, hearing and hard of hearing artists, our purpose was to approach the world of one another. We worked all together on understanding the world of silence, how it feels, how we could visualise it or perform it. We worked accordingly to approach the world of sounds and the one which is in-between those two. This has as a result 3 different worlds which we actually faced as 3 different stages. At first, we thought of using 3 bottles rolling at stairs (to show the stages), but soon we decided that we need something coming straight from nature.

We chose to use pinecone as our basic unit to show those 3 stages. Pinecone, comes from nature, is organic and alive! We could never use an artificial material, because our purpose was to show some kind of "behaviour" in these 3 different situations. Also, because of it's structure and shape was ideal to use it as symbol for the escalation from the one stage to the other. Furthermore, this escalation does exist in each stage also as we understood while researching. So, it also refers to different qualities of silence in the silence, the all the variety of sounds in the hearing world and, of course, the different stages that one experiences while being at the in-between stage, that of transition.

The 2 different worlds of SILENCE and SOUNDS but also the one IN-BETWEEN are all together forming the 3 stages of examination. - We did many experiments on how the pinecone is reacting with the honey on the one side and on the other side how the pinecone is reacting with the water.

For SILENCE we needed something thick but also bright, something slow but also rich. Something that will not change much the behaviour of the pinecone while it is in that kind of environment but in the same time, it would have a strong identity. This would be the h o n e y ! Coming slowly all over the pinecone, all around it until it has become an endless sea. Entering to each petal, one by one, like stepping from higher to lower ones, stage by stage.

This is how the pinecone is when it first enters the water and gradually it is closing its petals. This was a metafor to the psychology of deaf people. As many of them stated, they feel more isolated or usually they close themselves when they are not at their usual environment (usually they are surrounded by people who know to use sign language even if they do not have hearing problems -family & friends). But this, could be considered, also like the link between the world of silence and sounds, because everybody use their hands in order to communicate while being underwater. This forms an unofficial sign language. So, one could say that people's behaviour did not differ much in the water.

For the world of SOUNDS we placed at exhibition room plenty of pinecones for the people to play by holding them and use them like *musical instruments*. They could break their petals or scratch one with the other and we had placed also microphones in order to help the natural sound to be increased in order to be easier for deaf people to feel the vibrations.

Project coordinator Christine Sun Kim (NY based artist http://christinesunkim.com/), during the presentation of the workshops’ outcome, stands in front of our poem : "People say white is not a color but actually it includes every color that is also true for silence there are so many sounds in there" Giving space also to the audience to add lyrics to this poem by commenting on how they perceive silence (both deaf & hearing visitors). REFERENCES: .1 Joseph Beuys .2 John Cage "Silence", Wesleyan University Press, 1961