Marianne Mispelaëre – Sounds Make Worlds


Curator: Diana Marincu
8th December 2018 – 9th March 2019
Opening: 7th December 2018
Art Encounters Foundation, 46C Take Ionescu Blvd., (ISHO House), Timișoara

Marianne Mispelaëre proposes an archive of disappearance and a display of invisibility in a conceptual framework defined by the successive acts of erasure carried out by the collective memory and the overlapping of the residues within an “evasive palimpsest”. Made up of distant echoes and subtle vibrations, Sounds Make Worlds delves into a marginal history, one that is excluded from the dominant thinking systems based on which the political and economic priorities are determined globally. Inspired by the investigation of lost worlds and invisible crowds, Marianne’s works explore the consequences of these phenomena and their reflection in the public space. The identities that become blurred in the process of losing the common language claim their position in the dialogue that Marianne creates between sound and word, image and representation.

Sound is ordered by humans in music, lexical structures, language and culture. This process can be seen not only in what is being shaped anew, but also in the things that are lost along the way — identities dislodged from a geographical and historical framework while transitioning to other languages and cultural paradigms.


Bibliothèque des silences collects languages that have disappeared recently, from 1986 until today, marking the date and the geographical area of their disappearance. In turn, the image revisits its continuous process of undertaking responsibilities and assuming an essential role, that of developing collective consciousness. Silent Slogan is a rich repertoire of gestures that have become symbolic of the failure of the dialogue between civil society and political power. The protests of the past eight years have generated spontaneous gestures that Marianne transposes into a visual “atlas” comparable to a new, subversive alphabet with which one can communicate more effectively than with words. Taken from different contexts such as the Arab Spring or the Indignados, the images collected from the Internet represent the messages of the people who express their opinion using their hands instead of words.

The entire exhibition evokes discrete pieces of history for which true representation depends exclusively on our capacity of seeing what is not visible and listening to what is not heard.


The exhibition Marianne Mispelaëre – Sounds Make Worlds was organized in partnership with The French Institute in Timișoara.
Graphic design: Synopsis Media
Wall text: Techside