SARAJEVO Sound, and its shadow, silence, can be represented in various ways; most traditionally by notation, which itself has many different models. But sound can be represented also by image, or text and even cities, buildings, people. Therefore sound may be represented spatially by the language of architecture.
Within Sarajevo an incessant rhythm of tension exists through its temporal discontinuity due to the war. The city has experienced an abrupt transition. I have expressed this interruption with the discontinuity of sound in the city; the noise of destruction and the silence of memory incongruously juxtaposed to the sounds of everyday life; the absorption and reflection into the present.
The uninterrupted relationship of noise, sound and silence reveals this interruption as it exists solely in a temporal dimension. The auditory landscape uncovers a spatial experience in the city through the course of time as the intervention spaces are experienced physically. The interventions are based in acoustics, using sound as the raw material. They pursue connections that interact and combine, in order to fill the spaces with a simultaneous attraction of the architectural and the sonorous.
Three sites are identified within the city which display this discontinuity of sound; noise vs. sound, sound vs. silence, silence vs. noise. It is this condition that I wish to emphasize through displacement, memory and imagination by adding the third missing component through the architecture of acoustics. Thus my aim is to sensitize the ear to the auditory landscape of the city through an incongruous juxtaposition of sound, an exaggerated contrast to the sound condition from the past and present of these sites, to distort our visual perception.
In each site, the meaning, the acoustic intervention, is invisible but the invisible is not the contradictory of the visible, the current spatial and auditory experience: the visible itself has an invisible inner framework, and the invisible is the secret counterpart of the visible, it appears only within it. Therefore what will be physically experienced and perceived as a discontinuity, is in effect a necessary closure of the cycle.