Gonzalo and Susana Silva | Instrumentos de silencio

August 5 - 22, 2025

Instrumentos de silencio, the debut New York exhibition of Gonzalo and Susana Silva, 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 trans- formed into knowledge. Colonization, among other catastrophes, brought the disruption of technical traditions, leading to the atrophy of memory and the loss of the capacity to repre- sent the future.1 

The exhibition, however, approaches the interweaving of cultural matrices not as fusion or hybridity, but as the coexistence of contra- dictions. 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.2 

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. 

Each work is a project that sings, in its own way, about a particular story. Ritual, formulario e institución reflects on syncretism between Andean music and European notation in the hymn Hanacpachap Cussicuinin. Territorio sonoro weaves together the cartography of Guaraní Jesuit missions and music as a technology of evangelization. Códigos de vacío condenses pre-Hispanic geometric motifs and circuitry drawings into an abstract musi- cal score.  Two studies in collaboration explores experimental musical notation and the electroacoustic work of Hilda Dianda. Tocapu draws on Incan sacred geometry and connects it to imaginary scores. Wandering breath juxtaposes wind instruments contemporary to each other, but unknown to the other culture. Liturgia electrónica is a photograph of an old organ in Buenos Aires that highlights the technical and cultural adaptation of sacred spaces. To peak and pine revisits the story of Clementina, the first computer in the Southern Cone, whose name refers to the song “My Sweet Clementine.” El último organito is titled after a nostalgic tango, it formulates parallels between mechanical pianos and lost traditions.

The works in this show were commissioned as part of the visual arts cycle in 2023 for the Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-Day Saints Arts. The Ariel Bybee Endowment at the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts was established in 2021 to honor the legacy of distinguished mezzo-soprano Ariel Bybee (American, 1943-2018). 

Gonzalo Silva (b. 1991, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is an artist, educator, curator, and exhibition designer. He holds a degree in Visual Arts (UNA) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Epistemology and History of Science (UNTREF). In 2025, he received an honorable mention in the Medialab CCEBA Production Support program and was awarded a scholarship to attend the Organismo program at TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza. His work explores the relationship between art, science, and technology through analytical aesthetics and theoretical fiction, combining 3D animation, photogrammetry, and video games.

Susana Isabel Silva (b. 1976, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is a visual artist specializing in paper cutouts. Her work explores sacred narratives through a contemporary language, translating scriptures and symbols into poetic and structured compositions. Trained at the School of Fine Arts of Quilmes and the National University of the Arts (UNA), she is currently pursuing a diploma in Sacred Art (UCASAL). She has received multiple awards from the Church History Museum (Utah) and exhibited in the U.S. and Argentina. She lives and works in Buenos Aires and is a wife and mother of two.