Noise is not being able to look at the landscape in silence form a bus or a taxi, because the radio has to be turned on. Noise is not being able to wait for an airplane in silence, because the airport monitors are bombarding us with images; noise is not even being able to see the clouds in the sky when you are flying, because the shade has to be pulled down in order to see the movie.

 

But noise is also not being able to see the stars because urban contamination is too great, and not being able to remember, nor understand, what we have seen in them. What will become of man without being able to see the mystery of which they are speaking to us? Is it not then being without seeing the stars, a reduction of life to an unending cacophony of manual, mechanical or digital noises? Noises that devastate the most intimate part of our being without letting us hear the stellar whispers which connect us to the meaning of being human.

 

Thus, not with gentle murmurs, but with noise, is the way we expand in the universe our human desert, our filth, our “dream turned nightmare”, without being able to truly see what the stars tell us. We Know that they do not talk about launching missiles, about making the ocean waters tremble because of our arrogance, but maybe about generating alternatives to “conquering”, perhaps contemplating, perhaps resting, perhaps working inside ourselves as fragments of the immensity of which we are all part.

 

This is the space Dora Mejía proposes from her plastic arts point of view in the installation “Wandering through The universe”. This is the vision which coincides whit that of the astronaut looking at the blue planet, whit that of the scientific who feels pain whit the way we are devastating the oceans or theone of the biologist who witness the destruction of hundreds of acres of forest each minute.

 

This vision is the one of an artist who is inviting the individual to look from global human perspective, to silently become part of the universe and try not to destroy it by following the same logic which has led us to damage our house, Planet Earth.

 

Because the noise seems never to stop, never to rest, because all life forms in the forest are hiding from our conquest, and stars are occulted by the false brilliance of our arrogance, because the noise is much more than could be imagined by poets from others times, being an artist today involves an invitation to all human beings to remain in silence and contemplation, instead of just to act, in order to discern which actions are needed to preserve life…something which concerns of all of us.

 

Juan Alberto Gaviria. Curator and art critics. Colombo American Cultural Center of Medellín, Colombia.

 

November, 1996