The exhibition perceives Adrian Melis’s practice as affective labour and simultaneously interprets it as an investment in immaterial labour. Immaterial labour is labour that creates immaterial products, such as
knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response. The other face of immaterial
labour, as Michael Hardt explains, is affective labor. Affective labour is work carried out that is intended to
produce or modify emotional experiences in people. Among the background noise of everyday life, past experiences are repeatedly projected back to us, at times
almost imperceptible, or comfortably audible (although the source may still remain hidden). We
form part of some of these situations, and their resonance propagates without clear limits thus forming a space
which behaves as a political space and at times, as a psychological space; caught between the
collectivised and the personal. They are situations that speak to us of conflicts and of contrasts which ultimately
affect us, such as occupational factors, social unrest and other forms of misdirections in relation to what it means to live
in a western society and within its borders.
Absolute Silence does not exist by Adrian Melis (Havana, Cuba, 1985) resonates such experiences. The eight
works on display, some of which are new productions for this exhibition, attempt to establish a listening
channel with various forms of displacement as they are distorted and give rise
to ironic, tragic or absurd situations. What are
we able to listen and understand between the noise? Guided by various noises, improvised foley sounds and other acoustic interventions among all the non-silences
that surround the exhibition, it is possible that we may still discover that these unbreakable continuities
between cause and effect, signifier and signified, image and sound, all of which we have become used to may be conceived as merely background noises, and could in fact, be interpreted as no more than an obvious trace of our
neurosis. Inhabiting this new place of psychic economy, as described by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, governed by hypermodernity, uncertainty,
flexibility, precarity, fluidity and without gravity.
If we can agree that we hear things because we cannot see everything and that sounds and images may be
alternative objects of thought that are sustained by less simplistic relations and can be accessed through
differentiated drives, it is not surprising that Adrian Melis aims to retrace the new space that separates
psychology and politics surrounding this premise. Through the selection of works that comprise Absolute silence
does not exist Adrian Melis creates places wherein to listen, hear, understand and interpret. A place, to be more
exact, wherein one can explore to which extent it is still possible to detect new relations of meaning within the
soundscape, and a place one can inquire into the counter-powers of sound.