Blackout

'It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness.' - Yann Chateigne Tytelman

About the Author :
Yann Chateigné Tytelman is an author and art curator living in Brussels. He has been curator at the KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, head of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Geneva, and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux, among other positions. He is a guest lecturer in the Curatorial Studies programme at KASK & Conservatorium, Gent. In 2023, he co-founded Celador, an art space run by a reading group collective, in Brussels.

Review :
'A moving account of a son's search for his father's ghost, as well as a riveting enquiry into the notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art. Extraordinary.' - Jude Cook ‘A haunting, delicately woven elegy; a luminous act of love written into the void. Let it draw you in. Let it speak to your own silences.’ – Suzanne Joinson  'Silence is etymologically rooted in the idea of being quiet and still, of attending. The defining 'absence of sound' came much later. There are reasons why retreats are often predicated on silence. They seek to face directly the fear we have - identified so keenly by Jung - of the journey to the interior that 'silence' prompts. There is no such thing as absolute silence, of course. In an anechoic chamber, you become the sound you hear: your lungs, your heart, your eyelids. Tytelman's remarkable meditation on the presences made vivid by absence understands this instinctively, emotionally, intellectually and even metaphysically. He listens beyond listening. We carry our own silence and that of others like organs. We make our own silences and harvest them. In his haunted and haunting text, even ghosts are breathing.' – Gareth Evans 'Blackout offers an extended reflection on living within silence and emptiness, but through the accumulation of seemingly disconnected stories something else emerges: the pangs of absence enfolded one after another - but absence is always presence, silence is a teeming noise... Was the collective amnesia that followed our recent, yet somehow erased, enforced isolation necessary to forgetting a deeper revelation? For a moment, another kind of society presented itself, a society of gorgeous nothings given eyes to see in the dark.' - David Toop