| Location: | Room A |
Three-channel high-definition video installation. Through a wide-ranging exploration of sound, it examines the irreducible relationships between the living and the non-living, the human and the animal, and the terrestrial and the cosmic.
El gran silencio focuses on the world's largest single aperture radio telescope, located in Esperanza, Puerto Rico, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe.
The Arecibo Observatory site is also home to the last wild population of critically endangered Puerto Rican parrots, amazona vittata, which have their habitat in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest.
Visual artist couple Allora y Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script that explores translation as a device for tracking and reflecting on the irreducible gaps between living, non-living, human, animal, technological and cosmic actors. In the spirit of a fable, the subtitled story presents the bird's observations on humans' search for life outside this planet, while using the concept of vocal learning - something that both parrots and humans, and few other species, have in common - as a source of reflection on the acoustic voices, ventriloquisms and vibrations that form the basis of speech and the universe itself.
