A Dialogue with Efraín Rozas

Could you start by talking about Still? How would you describe it?

This installation or sound piece started during the lockdown in Lima. I was in my apartment, and I was alone in the silence in the streets. Performances were stopped, and I started thinking about questions like, “If no one sees what I do, will I continue doing it? If so, why do I do it? What is the deep motivation for it aside from people seeing it? Does everything need to have documentation? What happens with the ephemeral?”

This crisis has unveiled a lot of problems about how we live in terms of economy and ecology. In the experience of being alone in silence in Lima, I had a sense of how fragile this meaning of life was. It was a reminder to not forget that you don’t know anything. All these metanarratives and things that keep humanity going forward are very fragile. So, for me, it’s that silence of confronting that fragility of metanarrative. With a pandemic, the materiality of the real world or the non-spiritual relationships stopped, but then super quickly, everybody started to do the same things in the digital world, be that consumerism, be it a lack of ecology of information. We just reproduced all our practices instead of stopping for a bit to see what is going wrong.

We need to make deep questions of how we sense time, how we think of space, and the meaning of life. It’s not enough to criticize. A lot of the criticism of capitalism comes from a modern Western way of thinking. Even Marxism or critical thought still follows Western ideas of being, of meaning, of life, of linear time of progress. So, what if we question this? Then comes the idea of Still.

Tying back to the experience itself, how did you make use of the space at Queenslab? Why did you have the audience in a circle during the show?

I wanted people to experience existence in a pure way—just being in a room together with other people. The circle is a very primal and effective shape. It’s intimate, but with a certain distance, so you have your own experience too. I wanted people to feel the size of the space, to experience the materiality of silence, of quietness, of stillness, of the time passing, and to do it together.

The communal experience of that is a ritual. For me, I feel the need of a new language that talks about these limits of knowledge, of deep silence, of origin, death, life, time, space. Not from religion, not from New Age, but from a new language that talks about meaning of life, time, and space.

One thing that really stuck out with me is the way lights were also involved. How were you thinking about the shifts in light, and how did you envision that to correspond with the shifts in sound?

Yeah, so all the light and sound are just excuses or means to the end, which is that final silence and the experience of the room. As I was saying, in Western thought, there’s a tendency both for artists and for audiences to separate the senses. My attempt is to create an experience that isn’t even synesthetic because the concept of synesthesia assumes that the senses are separated. Any experience is always a synesthetic experience. Separating the senses is artificial. That long silence at the end of my piece is not about sound, or darkness. It’s about being in that room with other people and being aware of it. The sound and the lights are devices to put us in this moment of being and stillness.

And what is stillness? As I said, stillness is the most familiar experience and the most strange. It’s about really stopping and asking: what the hell is this? Where have we been thrown to when we were born? But we cover up this stillness in so many ways. We are afraid of it. Think capitalism and even Marxism—they all cover the most important question that doesn’t have an objective answer. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We fear the questions that don’t have an objective answer because we have forgotten to relate to things in a nonobjective way. I’m not saying that I know this non-objective relationship, but I know we need to remember it. It’s urgent actually. That doesn’t mean that it’s not knowledge. It’s just another way, another way of knowing.

Throughout the residency, you had multiple conversations—with a biologist, a philosopher, a percussionist, and a historian. How did these conversations inform your project?

These are subjects that I’ve been thinking a lot about. For me, Still was about abolishing very prevalent ideas that inform capitalism and the criticism of capitalism. For example, in the case of history, I interviewed the Peruvian historian Yukiko Takahashi about the myth of the Incas. There is the myth about them, a romanticized idea about the Incas. But the Inca state actually was an empire that was racist and dominated a lot of the population, and we have to embrace the ugly truth that there was a lot of betrayal and a lot of alliances between the Spanish nation and local enemies of the Incas.

We are talking about an empire, the Inca empire. We are talking about expert warriors. I think it’s even racist to think that an army of one hundred Spanish defeated an empire that went from Chile to Ecuador. This was a big military state. The history of human atrocity goes way before Spanish colonialism. It doesn’t deny that Western colonialism was a horrible thing, but we have to embrace the fact that the other side of racism is romanticization of non-Western cultures. Idealizing the pre-capitalist past and idealizing capitalist or Marxist futures is forcing linear time into history. Time and history are not an arrow going towards progress. Western thought has created an illusion of linear time when there are actually a lot of cyclical things, paradoxes, things that are tragic that have to be faced.

With Brian Adler, the percussionist, we talked a lot about how musics are informed by non-linear time. We talked about polyrhythm in West Africa, the drones in India, and the importance of the body as a producer of knowledge in synesthetic experiences. That was great because we shared a lot of interests.

With Carlos Carmona, we talked about how being has to do with life and death, but how we are much more than that. There are biological and emotional networks that come before our birth that are fundamental to who we are, and networks that go after our death. Ecology cannot be only based on life. Of course, birth and death are an important aspect, but it’s not only that. We have to start thinking of those limits in another way.

With philosopher Alejandra Borea, we talked about how we are objectifying life experiences and we are making them into things that can be bought or sold, quantified, and talked about in an objective form in social media. That objective way of thinking cannot answer the ultimate questions, and actually blurs and hides the questions that are at the core of a lot of the problems today. We have to question this. The problem with questioning Western thought, social media, Marxism, Capitalism, idealized pasts and futures is that we are left with emptiness, with the terrifying Western “silence.” But that is the place where we have to go if we want a real change. It’s up to us to create a new silence that is not dead, but capable of engendering new futures. We have to face it, even if it hurts.

Do you think that if we use your piece to inform how we practice our own lives, it could be compatible with how we currently live? Or do we need to completely overhaul the way we imagine ourselves?

My piece is very ambitious and very humble at the same time. Let’s start asking a question. I think we ought to start with that. It might seem useless in a way for urgent issues. But I think art and philosophy should take some time to ask these questions. This is a proposal to stop and think. I don’t think the answer has the shape of the language we have now. Science took thousands of years to develop, so just like that, there are questions that take time to answer. But we have to start asking them bravely. It takes bravery to ask a question that does not have an answer, because it puts you in a very tragic position.

Why don’t we start developing a new language? Let’s start talking about what is science and what is time. We are left with silence. But capitalism and Marxism demand an immediate action, they make us feel that silence is death, it’s terrifying. What is a silence that does not demand that, a silence that allows one to say, “OK, let’s observe. We have to learn.” Some might think I am talking about religion. But no. Let’s stop answering like that and something might happen, something new. Another way of saying things, something different. For example, when you fall in love or you have great sex for the first time. It’s another way of being in your body. It’s new… This is a new path, and let’s see where this takes me. That is another kind of knowledge related to true silence.