Instrumentos de silencio
Salt Lake City, UT | New York NY | Berkeley CA
By Gonzalo Silva & Susana Silva
Instrumentos de silencio, a new exhibition by Argentine artists Gonzalo Silva and Susana Silva, and the culminating exhibition for the 2023 prize in visual arts from the Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center. It opened August 5, 2025, in New York City and later travelled to Berkeley, California and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Rooted in Argentina’s history but reaching toward universal questions, Instrumentos de silencio reads like a visual essay—a speculative archaeology of sound and spirit. It traces cultural memory through pre-Columbian musical artifacts, colonial hymnals, magnetic tapes, and early computers. Through paper cut-outs, digital collage, UV printing, and sculptural forms, Instrumentos de silencio reflects on how both sound and silence have shaped their homeland and heritage.
This richly layered exhibition explores the interwoven legacies of music, technology, ancestry, and identity.
PREVIOUSLY EXHIBITED AT:
New York, NY
Sargent’s Daughters Gallery, Aug 5-22 2025
Berkeley, CA
Graduate Theological Union Library, Oct 10-Dec 17, 2025
Salt Lake City, UT
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Jan 16-Mar 13 2026
The series of 3-D printed bas reliefs, Territorio sonoro, explores the use of music as a technology for dominance. It connects the architectural designs of the “Musical Angels” friezes in the Trinidad Reduction with inset maps, engraved on computer circuit boards, that depict Spanish Jesuit settlements that took place over Guaraní territories (present-day Paraguay and Argentina). | Gonzalo Silva, Territorio sonoro (2025). 3D print, laser engraved FR-4 circuit board. 9½ x 13¾ inches.
The series of cut paper works, Códigos de vacío, is a highly-detailed series of marks that evoke computer punch cards, musical notation, and digital language in an abstract way. Instead of the binary of computers—on or off—these individual markings are not only open or closed, but partly open as well, which gives the surface of the paper a visual and tactile rhythmic cadence. The work in white paper is entirely hand-cut, the golden papered and red papered works are cut with a CNC laser cutter. | Susana Silva, Códigos de vacío, 2025. CNC and hand-cut paper, 28⅜ x 43¼ x 2¾ inches.
Gonzalo Silva, Territorio sonoro (2025). 3D print, laser engraved FR-4 circuit board, 9½ x 13¾ inches.
This work stems from the exploration of multiple systems of visual encoding, playing with the relationship between the punched cards used in early computers and graphic scores. The perforated patterns are traces of a language in transit—signs that could be read as bits, as notes, or as silences. The artist translates this logic of coding onto a new surface: cut and folded paper that breaks away from two-dimensionality and extends into space. | Susana Silva, Partitura modular, 2025. Folded hand-cut paper, 33⅞ x 17¾ x 2⅛ inches.
The title of this photograph comes from the folk ballad, “Oh My Darling Clementine,” which this Ferranti Mercury computer, the first scientific computer in Argentina (named Clementina), was programmed to play when booted up. Laser cut over the vintage image are the words “To peak and pine” in punch code letters and spaces, a verse of the song that was removed in popular variations. The computer was later programmed to play tango songs and was abandoned and dismantled during the ‘70s. | Gonzalo Silva, To peak and pine, 2025. Laser cut on giclée print, 13¼ x 15¾ inches.
In the photographic series, "Liturgia eléctrica," the artist explores the interior of a pipe organ in a 19th century Anglican church in Buenos Aires. The pipes, circuitry, bellows, and thermometer belie an extended history of constant use—an old instrument, made in the U.S. and transported to Argentina. Over time, the devotional object includes the handiwork of the skilled and unskilled technicians who have tried to keep it functioning, often jerry-rigged with simple wire or graffitied with pop culture imagery. | Gonzalo Silva, Liturgia eléctrica, 2025. Photograph, giclée print, 47¼ x 31½ inches.
Wandering Breath contains computer CD drives outfitted with images and objects that span centuries. It reflects upon different systems of storage and reproduction of memory and Western attempts to understand these other technologies. The object includes a black and white photograph of an architectural dig of human remains from the Mexica culture. Among the bones was discovered an object, here copied and 3-D printed in resin, that is a playable death whistle, whose ceremonial and musical purpose is still debated. Alongside scientific imagery there is a medieval miniature rendering of two musicians playing wind instruments. | Gonzalo Silva, Wandering Breath, 2025. CD drive, giclée print, resin 3D print, 11¾ x 5¾ x 1¾ inches.
The object includes printed and etched plexiglas panels that reproduce colonial and modern representations of quipus, an ancient Andean recording device composed of knotted ropes that probably were used to convey both mathematical and narrative information. | Gonzalo silva, Wandering Thread, 2025. CD drive, etched plexiglass, 7⅞ x 5¾ x 1¾ inches.
In Incan culture, tocapus were panels made prior to the arrival of the Spanish in Peru. Employing the graphic systems of the Quechua and Aymara languages, these panels appeared on textiles and objects of all kinds. With the arrival of the Europeans, much of this mastery disappeared as a communication system. The artist’s twelve panels of cut paper form layers of elaborate interplaying graphic improvisations. Tocapus, once found in ceremonial textiles and objects, functioned as encrypted visual languages. In this work, their communicative essence is reimagined through the creation of a contemporary graphic score. Rather than replicating traditional Incan symbols, the piece explores the connections between music and visual language, developing a rhythmic structure that operates as an abstract notation. Through layered graphic improvisations, the composition evokes the sensation of a woven textile. | Susana Silva, Tocapu, 2025. CNC and hand-cut paper, 61 x 61 inches.
Gonzalo Silva Gonzalo silva, Liturgia eléctrica, 2025. Photograph, giclée print, 26 x 39⅜ inches.
In 1631, "Hanacpachap Cussicunin" became the first Christian hymnal printed with musical notation in the Quechua language and the first musical score published in the New World. This 21st-century artist’s book engages critically with that historical precedent and is presented in two parts. The box, laser-cut on Fabriano paper, quotes fragments of the original liturgical text, revealing its dual nature: a tool of evangelization and an instrument of cultural subjugation. The folded signatures evoke the format of the colonial book but also question it. Through an architectural plan of the cathedral where the music was first performed, pages with its musical notation, and a detail from the original frontispiece, the work unfolds a reading that denounces the Western structure of the book as a device of symbolic containment. Here, the book not only transmits but also confines: It is a symbol of institution and power. Silence—understood as form—emerges as a central element. The absences, the blank spaces in the notation, the graphic pauses, are not mere voids but metaphors for what was silenced: the voices and worldviews suppressed under the guise of harmony. | Susana Silva, Ritual, formulario e institución, 2025. CNC and hand-cut paper, 11¾ x 16½ x 1⅝ inches.
Gonzalo Silva, Liturgia eléctrica, 2025. Photograph, giclée print, 47¼ x 31½ inches.
Gonzalo Silva, Liturgia eléctrica, 2025. Photograph, giclée print, 26 x 39⅜ inches.
Gonzalo Silva, Wandering Thread, 2025. CD drive, etched plexiglass, 7⅞ x 5¾ x 1¾ inches.
Susana Silva, Códigos de vacío, 2025. CNC and hand-cut paper, 28⅜ x 43¼ x 2¾ inches.
Susana Silva, Códigos de vacío, 2025. CNC and hand-cut paper, 28⅜ x 43¼ x 2¾ inches.
IN THE NEWS
Podcasts, Articles, & More about Instrumentos de silencio
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This art exhibit has traveled from coast to coast. Now it’s opening in Utah
Amy Ortiz, Deseret News
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How Motherhood Shaped the Art of This Argentine Latter-day Saint
Amy Ortiz, Deseret News
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Music, Technology, and Memory: Award-winning Art from Argentina
The Center’s Studio Podcast S8E8
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Speaking over Silence: A Conversation with Susana Silva & Gonzalo Silva
Guest Blog Post by Fleur Van Woerkom
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.
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.
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
Susana Isabel Silva (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist specializing in paper cutouts. Her current artistic practice is guided by the gospel of Jesus Christ, which she translates into images through scriptures, symbols, and sacred narratives brought into a contemporary visual language. Her work seeks to intertwine the sacred with the intimate and the everyday, shifting from abstraction toward a spiritual and symbolic dimension, while maintaining the structural rigor and geometric exploration that define her visual language.
She trained at the School of Fine Arts of Quilmes, where she earned her degree as Professor of Visual Arts, and continued her studies at the National University of the Arts (UNA). She attended various workshops in production and analysis, where she gradually left painting behind and began a material-based investigation that led her to develop the paper cutout technique she practices now. She is currently pursuing a diploma in Sacred Art at the Catholic University of Salta (UCASAL).
She has received awards such as the Acquisition Prize at the 11th, 12th, and 13th International Art Competitions of the Church History Museum (Utah), and mentions in exhibitions including Certain Women (USA), Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, and The Sacred Feminine in LDS Art & Theology. She has contributed to publications and journals, including Come, Follow Me, by the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts (NY). In 2023, she was awarded the Ariel Bybee Endowment Prize by the same institution. She lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Gonzalo Silva (b. 1991, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an artist, educator, curator, and exhibition designer exploring the entanglements between art, science, and technology through analytical aesthetics and theoretical fiction. He holds a degree in Visual Arts at UNA (Universidad Nacional de las Artes) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Epistemology and History of Science at UNTREF (Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero), focusing on the intersections between epistemology, speculative narratives, and technological imaginaries.
His practice combines 3D animation, photogrammetry, painting, 3D printing and video game design, investigating how these tools can operate as poetic and critical devices to address the materiality of digital media and ecological collapse within the Capitalocene. Gonzalo’s work emerges from research processes that intertwine archival materials, fieldwork, and speculative storytelling, resulting in pieces that inhabit both installation and digital environments.
In 2025, he received an honorable mention in the Medialab CCEBA Production Support program and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Organismo residency at TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza. That same year, he participated in Soberanía de las cosas at Palacio Libertad (former Centro Cultural Kirchner), exploring post-natural landscapes and corporative social engineering. In 2024, Gonzalo completed the Presente Contínuo program and co-curated Antología flotante by Carlos Bissolino at Centro Cultural Recoleta. In 2023 he was awarded with the Ariel Bybee Endowment Prize. His work has also been presented in awards such as Premio Andreani, Premio Ópera Prima, and Premio Itaú.
He aims to open spaces for collective imagination and critical reflection on the future of technological infrastructures, living and non-living agencies, and the role of fiction in navigating the complexities of the present. He lives and works in Buenos Aires.
Ariel Bybee & The Endowment at the Center
Learn more about Ariel Bybee’s legacy and the multi-disciplinary endowment.
Acknowledgements
Ariel Bybee Endowment Committee
Neylan McBaine
Patrick Perkins
Jamie Peterson
Donors to the Ariel Bybee Endowment
Allegra LaViola, owner, Sargent's Daughters Gallery
For the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts
Glen Nelson, Director of Special Projects
Mykal Urbina, Executive Director
Veronica Harvey, Director of Marketing and Communications
2023 Ariel Bybee Endowment Jury
Georgina Bringas, artist
Kent Christensen, artist
Janalee Emmer, director, Brigham Young University Museum of Art
Campbell Gray, retired director, The University of Queensland Art Museum
Allegra LaViola, owner and director, Sargent’s Daughters
Neylan McBaine, CEO, Duet Partner
Kah Poon, photographer
Warren Winegar, art advisor, Winegar Fine Art
Support for this exhibition was provided by the Kahlert Foundation and donors to The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.
