Silence is The Mother of Every Sound

Zimoun: The artist behind the cover.

Zimoun creates installations and sculptures that combine visual, sonorous and spatial elements. The Swiss artist’s immersive works are compositions in a musical sense, but he does not actively intervene in the development of their sound. As a self-taught artist, he improvises by using raw, everyday materials such as cardboard boxes, plastic bags, or wooden spars combined with mechanical elements for the visual aspect of his creations. All these elements are united at the end, orchestrated to generate a tonal and visual complexity. The function and aesthetics allow us to emphasize the perception of things and consciousness that induce the individual and the mass to combine. In addition to his installations, Zimoun develops purely acoustic pieces as well, collaborating with talented musicians and visual artists.

Talking to Zimoun for this interview not only reinforced my initial interest in his work but invited me to explore his universe of observation and questioning through sound sculptures, immersive installations and minimalist constructions.

Karen: How did you discover your sensibility for the arts?

Zimoun: Oh, that's difficult to answer. I've always had an interest in music and visual activities and experiments since I was a child, ever since I remember. I learned to play musical instruments at an early age, started making small compositions and playing with old printing presses, manipulating them and observing what results were influenced by the manipulations. In this sense, there was no explicit moment when I became interested in art. The fascination seems to have always been there somehow. 

K: How did growing up in Bern, Switzerland impact your development and consolidation as an artist?

Z: In a way, one is influenced by everything to some extent I think. By everything that is there, but probably also by everything that is not there. During my teenage years, practically all my friends were creatively active. We made a lot of music, painted walls, had crazy parties, just played theater for ourselves; we did a lot of nonsense, tons of experiments, everything possible and impossible driven by youthful exuberance and energy. In a way, you could say we were all artists at that time - and some of us still are. This time was certainly important in its own way, but it is difficult to say what exactly left what traces and why. 

K: Which visual and audio references influence your art the most?

Z: I don't think this can be broken down to individual elements. It seems to be the sum of the whole, the world in which we live, observe and question... Of course, there have always been artists or movements that particularly interested me. For example, minimalism and reductive methods, but also many other things like philosophies, architecture and materialities, nature with its riddles and beauties, societies with their excesses and absurdities, the way we deal with ourselves and the world around us... or the preoccupation with perception and consciousness...

K: Sound and visual rhythm had become a common thread in your work. Is this part of an intention for reproducing cyclical natural phenomena?

Z: I don't try to reproduce anything in particular or to address a single thing in my work. Rather, I try to create fields and conditions that invite observation and questioning. For me, a piece works well when I confront myself with new thoughts, observations and questions every time I look at it; when the work 'activates' me to think and at the same time allows me to lose myself in it. To put it bluntly, the work itself is, in a way, just an accumulation of material. The question that seems interesting to me is what happens between this material and me as a viewer. Of course, there are various aspects that have occupied me for many years and that I have been investigating. For example, I try to study complexity using systems that are as simple as possible. Investigating complexity has a lot to do with questions about our perception and states of consciousness. Also connections to nature. Or I also see the works as musical compositions. I use the same materials over and over again and recycle them continuously, which also has an ecological and therefore also a political component. Or the works themselves also represent for me different connections to our societies. Individuality and mass, order and chaos, or basically systems that are supported and nourished by the numerous individual elements, systems that are dependent on these individuals and exploit them at the same time. For me, there are many such aspects that flow into the works. In the end, however, the question is what happens between us and the work and how we reflect ourselves and our surroundings.  

K: What are your criteria when deciding what materials to use for building your installations?

Z: There are various aspects that come together. On the one hand, I am driven by the search for simplicity and reduction, which has a minimalist component. This is also expressed in the choice of materials and in the effort to use as few different materials as possible. I am interested in simple, unspectacular materials from everyday life and industry. Also the beauty of primitive materials, which is often forgotten or overseen. The raw and honest material. On the other hand, as already mentioned, there is also the ecological and political component of recycling and reusing. We avoid any kind of animal-related products here in the studio; we built practically the entire furnishings of the studio out of waste materials. 

K: What role does time and temporality play in your work?

Z: Time sequences, in the sense of a development or change over a certain period of time, do not exist in my work. I understand them more as states and as moments, or as a kind of organism. They are present in a way similar to a river that is there, whose microstructures are constantly changing slightly and developing an infinite number of variations, but never fundamentally changing. There is no beginning and no end, but a presence. One can join this presence, spend any amount of time with it, and then leave. But there is no narrative or predefined course of events - except the duration of the exhibition which is defined, or the opening hours.  

K: Through your installations, you explore the concept of juxtaposition itself. Could you tell us more about this idea and your techniques to portray contrasting elements in the same piece and make them work together?

Z: I am looking for systems that are as simple or even primitive as possible, which allow me to investigate complexity. Principles that, despite their underlying simplicity, develop complexity in their behavior. This complexity often arises from the dynamics of the activated materials themselves, but also from the multiplication of these elements and their spatial distribution. Multi-layered three-dimensional sound spaces emerge. There are also works in which optical phenomena become observable through multiplication. Another apparent contrast is mass and individuality. On the one hand, there are often many seemingly identical mechanical apparatuses in use, which are all made of the same materials and look identical, but nevertheless produce an individual behavior and thus a uniqueness. This individuality only becomes clear and observable in the mass. Here, multiplication also functions in a similar way to a test arrangement. The individuality of the single elements is partly due to a non-precision in the production. All elements are produced by hand in my studio. Therefore, many slight variations occur, which are often hardly recognizable visually but can have an effect on the behavior of the elements. This creates another contrast that can be found in my work: precision and imprecision. Or often the set-up is organized in a clear structure but the behavior of the systems is chaotic. So we get order and chaos. Many such juxtapositions can be found.       

K: It is evident that the exploration of sound is one of the main elements that shape your artworks, but what role does silence play in them?

Z: I think silence is the mother of every sound - or even its universe. Without silence, a sound cannot really unfold and therefore becomes observable only to a very limited extent, if at all. Silence is therefore the most central element to allow a comprehensive sound development and experience at all. American composer John Cage once said, very beautifully, 'Every something is an echo of nothing.'

The silence and stillness is then in turn also a fruitful basis for observations. When the mind is calm, the spaces open up. In this sense, silence is much more relevant than any sound as it allows it to happen in the first place, indeed it even accommodates it. The most impossible situations to present my work are situations where silence is not present. They make it impossible for the works to develop power and presence. Even people who are in the same room and speak reduce the sound experience by at least 80% I would say. The works and the audience need silence and time together. 

K: You also have many audio works. What link exists between your work and music?

Z: There are many parallels between the purely acoustic works and the installation and sculptures - but also differences. The biggest difference is probably that the actual sound production is not visible in the purely acoustic works and, therefore, there is no visual component. Both types of work deal with sound spaces and are compositions that function more as sound sculptures or sound architectures. As spaces that can be entered and left again, similar to a building, you can look around in them, become aware of peculiarities, and observe things around you and your own perception. Concentrated listening opens deeper and deeper spaces, and phenomena from psychoacoustics emerge. Both types of work deal with the small noises and sounds, the microscopic sound structures and textures. The universe of the small suddenly becomes very large.   

K: You have exhibited at different international scenes including Seoul, Florida, Santiago de Chile, Canada, Japan, New York, France and Belgium, among many others. Does your approach and creative process vary or adapt depending on the place where it is going to be exhibited?

Z: The starting point for developing a work is always the space itself. However, it is not primarily important where this space is located but how it is constituted, including its architectural qualities, particularities and proportions. Practically all installations are space-specific. Even if they are already existing concepts and principles, the works are tailored to each individual space. Other circumstances also play a role in the development of the work presented, such as the time available to set up an exhibition, the size of the team that can be deployed in the construction, or the financial constraints that have to be met.