Miista x Lost Property – The Silence That Speaks

MAKING SPACE FOR CONVERSATION

Everything we do starts from a place of curiosity, connection and conversation so it made perfect sense to us to gather our London Crowd together for an evening of lectures, hosted in collaboration with Lost Property.

LAUGHTER AND CHATTER ECHOED AROUND THE CROWDED ROOM, UNDER THE RAILWAY ARCHES IN HOXTON.

Chairs scraped and shuffled as people settled into their seats.

But before our four speakers Zaiba Jabbar, Claire Marie Healy, Eve Stainton and Hanna Elyse Girma gave their presentations, Letty Cole began the evening with a ‘mini lecture’ on “the space between”.

“One of the main reasons I founded Lost Property, was to give us all some space back to learn to think again

– to force all of you to sit down without your phones and meditate on an idea you may have only spent a second or moment on before.”

A self-professed, loud, black, American emotional oversharing woman, she noted there is an acoustic hierarchy:

“Blackness is loud, poor people are loud. Certain bodies are interpreted as noisy before they have even spoken.”

And she questioned our silence: “this is not to attack any soft-spoken cuties out there, but more to ask: are you silent or have you been silenced?”

Turning Gucci Mane into feminist theorist, she said that his “Ugly girls quiet. Pretty girls riot.” lyric rather than being misogynistic was instead a rejection of western cultures most enduring feminine archetype, the beautiful silent woman. “In this sense he favours the bold. And hates the silent neutral ass bitch.”

Using famous duos like Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, Brandy and Monica to exemplify different volumes of feminine chaos in culture, Hanna called for the rejection of passive femininity and made a call-to-arms for more noise. Having

“NEVER MOVED IN SILENCE A DAY IN MY LIFE”

she would rather be more Riot Girl like Bikini Kill than voiceless but desirable to men like The Little Mermaid.

For Eve Stainton, ‘the silence that speaks’, was about slowing everything down to create suspense. The first half of their lecture they moved silently, wordlessly, exaggerating every movement.

“MOVEMENT IS A FORM OF LANGUAGE”

they said. When at last, they did speak, Eve talked about their fascination with ways to build suspense.

They referenced the 80s movie Jaws, as an excellent example of withholding information to build a silent suspenseful tension. The audience watching the father’s face as he slowly realizes that his son is in the water and the shark is in there too.

For their own practice,

“I’M BASICALLY CYCLING THROUGH ALMOST A PLAYLIST,

multiple references that I’ve gathered over time of people’s faces in extreme emotional expression.”

Their obsession with suspense is, “as a way of generating atmospheres in my work through pacing, uncertainty, and delaying resolution. Suspense literally means suspending an arrival. And for me, that feels political. I'm interested in disrupting the way stereotypes and assumptions are formed.

RESISTING THE IDEA OF A CLEAR AND FULLY KNOWABLE CHARACTER.”

Claire Marie Healey, meanwhile, shared her habit for oversharing in conversation – which sent her into cycle of “yapper’s regret”.

Her suggestion that perhaps what we really needed was less “visually memorable but restrained” women in culture and more noisy real women like those that feature in the films of Éric Rohmer.

She talked about the necessity to rewild communication and make space for new ways to co-exist with technology.

The evening finished with questions from the audience, because this was a night to gather, listen and to make space for conversation. And what we realised was that it was impossible to contextualise silence without being able to talk about it.

To quote Letty who quoted John Cage – upon hearing his heartbeat in a sensory deprivation room – whilst in search of silence for his seminal 4’33’’ composition: There’s

“NO SUCH THING AS SILENCE. ONLY THE SPACE TO HEAR.”