Faraneh Maadani

Resonant Absences

 Can silence shape space? Might absence become presence?

Silence lingers. It doesn’t shout, but it speaks. It is not just the absence of sound, but a presence in itself; a quiet potential, charged with depth and tension. An atmospheric experience that unfolds slowly and subtly. It hums beneath surfaces, hides in shadows, and vibrates in stillness. Like an afterimage of sound, it resonates quietly, shaping how we feel, perceive, and move.

My project began with a question: How can musical silence be translated into space?

Coming from a background in architecture and as someone who has been closely engaged with music for years, I have long been fascinated by how sound shapes space. Yet it was silence that posed a more elusive and poetic challenge. Through this exploration, I arrived at four key spatial elements: shadow, reflection, resonance, and emptiness.

Shadow expresses the paradox of presence and absence. It exists only through something we do not directly see. In my spatial compositions, shadows become temporal traces: layered, slightly misaligned, and shifting with light and time. Their presence is defined through binary oppositions. When they lack a visible source, they carry an independent presence, like silence, which exists in relation to sound yet stands on its own.

Reflection functions not just as visual mirroring, but as a means of creating delay, distortion, and dynamic shadow play. Reflective surfaces echo movement and light in the same way silence echoes sound, subtly and indirectly. Together, reflections and shadows generate a visual resonance that makes absence perceptible.

Emptiness, drawing from the notion of emptiness in Buddhism, is treated not as nothingness but as openness. It emerges within in-between spaces: thresholds, voids, and transitions. These are not passive gaps but active zones. Here, silence is not stillness, but a charged space between events and presences. Ultimately, this project seeks to translate the poetics of musical silence into spatial experience.

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