Gonzalo Silva & Susana Silva
Ariel Bybee Endowment Prize Winners ‘23
Sargent’s Daughters Gallery New York, NY
August 5-19, 2025
SAVE THE DATEExhibition Opening:
08.05.2025
Sargent’s Daughters Gallery, New York, NYJoin us in celebrating the opening of Instrumentos de silencio with the artists & friends of the Center.
More details to come.
About the Exhibition
Scars / Scores
Instrumentos de silencio explores the tensions and resonances between hearing devices, inscription techniques, and processes of cultural syncretism in the encounters between the Americas and Europe. Through a constellation of works —combining paper cut-outs, 3D printing, UV printing on steel, and digital collage— it examines the ways in which music, as a technology of memory and writing, articulates genealogies of conquest, resistance, and cohabitation.
Memory is externalized through technical objects, and it is through them that we construct the narratives that give meaning to our past, shape our reality, and allow us to imagine possible futures. Codex notations, magnetic tapes, zoomorphic whistles, mechanical instruments, and early computers all act as vessels where musical practices are transformed into knowledge.
El último organito by Susana Silva
CNC and hand-cut paper, 20x20x100 cm
Territorio sonoro by Gonzalo Silva
Giclée print, UV print on steel, & printed circuit board
60x40 cm
Coexistence / Contradiactions
Colonization, among other catastrophes, brought the disruption of technical traditions, leading to the atrophy of memory and the loss of the capacity to represent the future.
The exhibition, however, approaches the interweaving of cultural matrices not as fusion or hybridity, but as the coexistence of contradictions. It is not about denying the parts or seeking a synthesis, but about acknowledging the ongoing struggle within our subjectivity: between the indigenous and the European, between innovation and tradition, between the individual and the collective.
Left: Wandering breath by Gonzalo Silva
Hydroprint on resin 3D print, 12x13x15 cm
Right: Liturgia eléctrica by Gonzalo Silva
Gonzalo Silva Photograph, giclée print, 90x120 cm
Restore / Activate
Pre-Columbian musical artifacts engage in dialogue with medieval European manuals, and between its perforations, imaginary scores reveal layers of exchange, violence, and appropriation that do not dissolve into synthesis but persist as active frictions. Instrumentos de silencio presents itself as an essay on plurality, on disarticulating inherited logics, and on creatively embracing the coexistence of elements in tension. It proposes a speculative archaeology of musical memory: an exploration through silences, fragments, and hybrid objects that do not seek to restore an origin, but to activate a critical listening to the traces technologies have inscribed upon bodies, territories, and cultures.
Score of Hanacpachap cussicuinin, first christian hymn in Quechua language (Juan Pérez de Bocanegra, 1631, Kingdom of Perú)
About the Artists
Ariel Bybee Endowment Winners 2023
Sister-and-brother artists from Buenos Aires, Susana and Gonzalo Silva, were selected as the 2023 Prize winners of the Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center.
Their winning proposal refers to a fellow Argentinean and female pioneer of electroacoustic music in Latin America, Hilda Dianda (b. 1925). Dianda’s Dos Estudios en Oposición (“Two Studies in Opposition,” 1959) was intended for magnetic tape. Likewise, the Silvas’ proposal, “two studies in collaboration” is conceived as a mixed-media installation that explores two distinct research frameworks: the dialogue between graphical music notation and its relationship with contemporary visual art; and a review of Latin American, female representation within the canon of contemporary musical history.
Ariel Bybee & The Endowment at the Center
Learn more about Ariel Bybee’s legacy and the multi-disciplinary endowment.
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