Silvia Noronha at Kunstverein Göttingen

Artist: Silvia Noronha

Exhibition title: the breath below

Curated by: Vincent Schier

Venue: Kunstverein Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

Date: January 14 – February 20, 2022

Photography: All works courtesy the artist. Images by Hannes Wiedemann, © Kunstverein Göttingen

In her work, Silvia Noronha engages with possible future scenarios and the ways they are influenced and determined by the present. She develops long-term projects through ongoing research processes and interdisciplinary collaborations that expand, change and transform over time and with newly gained insights.

For the exhibition at Kunstverein Göttingen, the artist transforms the exhibition space into a collection of materials. Stones, wood, construction materials and metals are stored in the exhibition and combine to form a reflection of our immediate environment. The interaction between the different materials shows how, in the end, everything in this environment is connected. A participatory sound installation, created in collaboration with the sound artist Niko de Paula Lefort, not only makes this fact visible, but also audible, by inviting into the energetic inter-relations of matter and the environment, which are captured and translated by a performative radio transmission ecosystem. This positions visitors as an integral and activating part of the material collection.

A collaboration with Anais-karenin was also fundamental for Endo Coisa [Endo Thing] — in which growing crystals will change the work over the course of the exhibition — because her knowledge of plants was as important for the work as Silvia Noronha’s intensive study of rocks.

The basic assumption that everything is connected is also evident in the ongoing and ever-expanding artistic research project, Shifting Geologies. In the context of the work, which was begun in 2020, the artist directs the gaze towards a possible future and visualizes what archeological findings might look like in a distant time. At the same time, she addresses what these will reveal about the way we treat our environment. the breath below is not, however, an exhibition that grapples with ecological issues in an admonitory manner. Rather, it is an observation and survey that makes connections visible and shows that the relationships between material, civilization and environment will outlive today.