creative writing school
Module 2: Slowness
structure
Introduction
Theory
Inspiration:
Share your text with us
Theory
Inspiration:
- Anri Sala: "Intervista" (1999)
Share your text with us
introduction
Silence is rarely neutral.
The same silence can be experienced as comfort, violence, intimacy, exclusion, contemplation, censorship, or grief depending on who is silent, who is speaking, and under what conditions.
This is what makes silence so difficult to define.
We often imagine silence as the absence of language. Yet silence is deeply entangled with language. Every conversation contains silences. Every text contains silences. Every history contains silences. Sometimes silence appears because words are insufficient. Sometimes because they are forbidden. Sometimes because they are unnecessary.
As writers, we are trained to work with words. We search for the right formulation, the right image, the right sentence. Yet some experiences resist articulation. Others disappear during the process of articulation itself. The moment we name something, we also reduce it. Language reveals, but it also excludes. Every word illuminates certain aspects of reality while leaving others in the shadows.
Silence also has a political dimension. Entire communities, histories, and experiences can be pushed into silence. Because conditions prevent them from being spoken, heard, or recorded. Silence is therefore never only personal. It is also social, historical, and institutional.
This week, we will explore silence as a creative material. As something that structures writing.
Omissions, interruptions, absences, gaps, pauses, unfinished sentences, withheld information, suspended meanings, things that remain unsaid.
We will ask what happens when silence stops being understood as emptiness and begins to be understood as a form of presence.
Through the work of Anri Sala, particularly Intervista, we will encounter silence as a rupture between language and memory. A place where something has been lost, yet continues to leave traces.
Perhaps the question of this lesson is not how to write. But how to focus on what remains unsaid.
The same silence can be experienced as comfort, violence, intimacy, exclusion, contemplation, censorship, or grief depending on who is silent, who is speaking, and under what conditions.
This is what makes silence so difficult to define.
We often imagine silence as the absence of language. Yet silence is deeply entangled with language. Every conversation contains silences. Every text contains silences. Every history contains silences. Sometimes silence appears because words are insufficient. Sometimes because they are forbidden. Sometimes because they are unnecessary.
As writers, we are trained to work with words. We search for the right formulation, the right image, the right sentence. Yet some experiences resist articulation. Others disappear during the process of articulation itself. The moment we name something, we also reduce it. Language reveals, but it also excludes. Every word illuminates certain aspects of reality while leaving others in the shadows.
Silence also has a political dimension. Entire communities, histories, and experiences can be pushed into silence. Because conditions prevent them from being spoken, heard, or recorded. Silence is therefore never only personal. It is also social, historical, and institutional.
This week, we will explore silence as a creative material. As something that structures writing.
Omissions, interruptions, absences, gaps, pauses, unfinished sentences, withheld information, suspended meanings, things that remain unsaid.
We will ask what happens when silence stops being understood as emptiness and begins to be understood as a form of presence.
Through the work of Anri Sala, particularly Intervista, we will encounter silence as a rupture between language and memory. A place where something has been lost, yet continues to leave traces.
Perhaps the question of this lesson is not how to write. But how to focus on what remains unsaid.
theory
Silence is often associated with peace, contemplation, and introspection. Yet history suggests something more troubling. Silence is also one of the most effective technologies of power.
Unlike violence, silence leaves few visible traces. Unlike censorship, it often operates without explicit prohibition. It does not always prevent speech. More often, it shapes the conditions under which speech becomes possible, impossible, desirable, dangerous, legitimate, or unthinkable.
This is why silence interests me politically. Because entire structures can be organized around what remains unsaid.
Michel Foucault repeatedly reminds us that power does not operate primarily through repression. It operates through production. It produces norms, truths, acceptable forms of behavior, acceptable forms of knowledge. Every institution simultaneously determines what can be spoken and what must remain silent.
Silence is therefore never outside discourse. It is one of its organizing principles. Every system of knowledge contains blind spots. Every institution has its taboos. Every ideology depends on things it cannot fully acknowledge.
Religion offers a clear example. Throughout history, religious institutions have often distinguished between legitimate questions and forbidden ones, between orthodoxy and heresy. Certain doubts become unacceptable not because they are false, but because they threaten the stability of the system itself. Silence becomes a mechanism through which authority protects its own foundations.
The same logic can be found in education. This is what Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed through his critique of what he calls the banking model of education. Knowledge is deposited into passive students. Learning becomes transmission rather than dialogue. What interests me here is not simply the educational model itself, but the silence it produces. Students learn to reproduce knowledge before questioning it. To memorize before challenging. To adapt before transforming. Silence becomes pedagogical. Not the silence of listening, but the silence of compliance. The silence of understanding one's place within a hierarchy. As an educator, this distinction feels particularly important to me. Not all silence is oppressive. But educational structures often struggle to distinguish between silence that emerges from reflection and silence that emerges from fear.
One creates learning.
The other prevents it.
Political regimes understand this distinction very well.
Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism demonstrates that domination does not only require controlling bodies. It requires controlling public space itself. The space where people gather, exchange ideas, disagree, and imagine alternatives.
Authoritarian systems do not merely silence criticism.
They destroy the conditions that make criticism possible.
Because every act of speech begins long before words appear. It begins with the imagination that another reality could exist. Silencing therefore operates not only on language. It operates on possibility.
This is perhaps why censorship is never simply about removing information.
It is about narrowing reality itself.
Reducing what can be imagined.
Reducing what can be desired.
Reducing what can be said.
Yet silence does not belong exclusively to power.
Silence can also become a form of resistance. A refusal to participate. A refusal to reproduce dominant language. A refusal to transform every experience into visibility.
The artist John Cage understood this beautifully in 4'33".
The piece is often misunderstood as a work about emptiness. In reality, it is a work about attention.
The performer does not produce sound, yet the space immediately fills with sound: breathing, shifting bodies, distant noises, ventilation systems, accidental events. Cage reveals something essential: silence does not exist. What exists is listening. The work transforms silence from absence into perception. From void into attention.
This resonates strongly with Simone Weil's understanding of attention as an ethical practice. For Weil, attention is not concentration in the conventional sense. It is a form of radical openness. A willingness to remain present without immediately imposing interpretation, judgment, or utility. Silence becomes the condition that makes such attention possible.
Psychology complicates this picture further.
Freud reminds us that silence is never necessarily peaceful. Repression functions through silence. Certain memories, desires, conflicts, and experiences become unspeakable, pushed outside conscious awareness. Yet they do not disappear. They return indirectly through dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, compulsions.
Silence, in this sense, is productive. It produces ghosts.
Jacques Lacan takes this further. For Lacan, language can never fully capture reality. There is always something that escapes symbolization. Something that remains outside language. Silence therefore marks a limit. Not a failure of language, but a reminder that language can never contain everything. Some experiences remain partially inaccessible.Some realities exceed articulation.
As writers, this is perhaps one of the most important lessons silence can offer us. Not everything needs to be explained. Not everything can be explained. Sometimes the most powerful part of a text is precisely the space where language reaches its limit.
This brings us to Anri Sala's Intervista. What fascinates me about this work is that its central absence is not metaphorical. It is material. A film recording of the artist's mother speaking during the communist era is discovered without its soundtrack. The words have disappeared. The mouth moves. History remains visible. But language is gone. The entire work unfolds around this absence. Around what can no longer be accessed directly. The missing soundtrack becomes more than a technical problem. It becomes a political and historical question.
What interests me is that the film never completely resolves this absence. The silence remains. And perhaps this is precisely where its power resides. Because silence is not always a gap waiting to be filled. Sometimes silence is the thing itself.
The trace.
The wound.
The limit.
The unanswered question around which meaning continues to circulate.
Unlike violence, silence leaves few visible traces. Unlike censorship, it often operates without explicit prohibition. It does not always prevent speech. More often, it shapes the conditions under which speech becomes possible, impossible, desirable, dangerous, legitimate, or unthinkable.
This is why silence interests me politically. Because entire structures can be organized around what remains unsaid.
Michel Foucault repeatedly reminds us that power does not operate primarily through repression. It operates through production. It produces norms, truths, acceptable forms of behavior, acceptable forms of knowledge. Every institution simultaneously determines what can be spoken and what must remain silent.
Silence is therefore never outside discourse. It is one of its organizing principles. Every system of knowledge contains blind spots. Every institution has its taboos. Every ideology depends on things it cannot fully acknowledge.
Religion offers a clear example. Throughout history, religious institutions have often distinguished between legitimate questions and forbidden ones, between orthodoxy and heresy. Certain doubts become unacceptable not because they are false, but because they threaten the stability of the system itself. Silence becomes a mechanism through which authority protects its own foundations.
The same logic can be found in education. This is what Paulo Freire describes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed through his critique of what he calls the banking model of education. Knowledge is deposited into passive students. Learning becomes transmission rather than dialogue. What interests me here is not simply the educational model itself, but the silence it produces. Students learn to reproduce knowledge before questioning it. To memorize before challenging. To adapt before transforming. Silence becomes pedagogical. Not the silence of listening, but the silence of compliance. The silence of understanding one's place within a hierarchy. As an educator, this distinction feels particularly important to me. Not all silence is oppressive. But educational structures often struggle to distinguish between silence that emerges from reflection and silence that emerges from fear.
One creates learning.
The other prevents it.
Political regimes understand this distinction very well.
Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism demonstrates that domination does not only require controlling bodies. It requires controlling public space itself. The space where people gather, exchange ideas, disagree, and imagine alternatives.
Authoritarian systems do not merely silence criticism.
They destroy the conditions that make criticism possible.
Because every act of speech begins long before words appear. It begins with the imagination that another reality could exist. Silencing therefore operates not only on language. It operates on possibility.
This is perhaps why censorship is never simply about removing information.
It is about narrowing reality itself.
Reducing what can be imagined.
Reducing what can be desired.
Reducing what can be said.
Yet silence does not belong exclusively to power.
Silence can also become a form of resistance. A refusal to participate. A refusal to reproduce dominant language. A refusal to transform every experience into visibility.
The artist John Cage understood this beautifully in 4'33".
The piece is often misunderstood as a work about emptiness. In reality, it is a work about attention.
The performer does not produce sound, yet the space immediately fills with sound: breathing, shifting bodies, distant noises, ventilation systems, accidental events. Cage reveals something essential: silence does not exist. What exists is listening. The work transforms silence from absence into perception. From void into attention.
This resonates strongly with Simone Weil's understanding of attention as an ethical practice. For Weil, attention is not concentration in the conventional sense. It is a form of radical openness. A willingness to remain present without immediately imposing interpretation, judgment, or utility. Silence becomes the condition that makes such attention possible.
Psychology complicates this picture further.
Freud reminds us that silence is never necessarily peaceful. Repression functions through silence. Certain memories, desires, conflicts, and experiences become unspeakable, pushed outside conscious awareness. Yet they do not disappear. They return indirectly through dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, compulsions.
Silence, in this sense, is productive. It produces ghosts.
Jacques Lacan takes this further. For Lacan, language can never fully capture reality. There is always something that escapes symbolization. Something that remains outside language. Silence therefore marks a limit. Not a failure of language, but a reminder that language can never contain everything. Some experiences remain partially inaccessible.Some realities exceed articulation.
As writers, this is perhaps one of the most important lessons silence can offer us. Not everything needs to be explained. Not everything can be explained. Sometimes the most powerful part of a text is precisely the space where language reaches its limit.
This brings us to Anri Sala's Intervista. What fascinates me about this work is that its central absence is not metaphorical. It is material. A film recording of the artist's mother speaking during the communist era is discovered without its soundtrack. The words have disappeared. The mouth moves. History remains visible. But language is gone. The entire work unfolds around this absence. Around what can no longer be accessed directly. The missing soundtrack becomes more than a technical problem. It becomes a political and historical question.
What interests me is that the film never completely resolves this absence. The silence remains. And perhaps this is precisely where its power resides. Because silence is not always a gap waiting to be filled. Sometimes silence is the thing itself.
The trace.
The wound.
The limit.
The unanswered question around which meaning continues to circulate.
inspiration
In Intervista (1999), Anri Sala's mother appears as a young communist activist speaking at a political youth congress during the dictatorship in Albania. The image survives. The voice does not. The soundtrack is missing.
At first glance, this might seem like a technical accident. Yet the entire work unfolds from this absence. A mouth continues to move. Gestures remain visible. Conviction remains visible. History remains visible. But language has disappeared. This disappearance transforms the film into something uncanny.
Sala does not simply accept this loss. He begins an investigation. Through professional lip-readers from a school for the deaf, he attempts to reconstruct what his mother once said. The work therefore becomes a search. Not only for missing words. But for a lost relationship between language, memory, and history.
As the reconstruction progresses, another absence emerges.
His mother herself can no longer remember her speech.
The young woman speaking passionately on the screen and the older woman watching the footage decades later no longer share the same political language, the same convictions, perhaps not even the same understanding of reality.
This is where the work becomes particularly moving. Because the silence is no longer simply technological. It becomes historical. Existential.
What happens when a person survives their own ideology?
What happens when the language that once organized an entire world loses its meaning?
What remains when the words are recovered but the belief behind them has disappeared?
The film reveals something uncomfortable about memory: we often imagine forgetting as the disappearance of information. But forgetting is also the disappearance of context. Sometimes we remember the words while losing the world that made those words meaningful.
This is particularly visible in societies that have undergone profound political transformation. Entire generations may discover that the language through which they once understood reality no longer functions. Slogans remain. Speeches remain. Images remain. But belief does not.
Meaning fractures. A gap appears between past and present.
Intervista inhabits this gap.
This is why I do not primarily see the film as a work about memory. I see it as a work about historical silence. A silence that appears after an ideology collapses. A silence that remains when history moves on but its traces continue to inhabit bodies, families, and memories. A silence between generations. A silence between who we were and who we have become.
For writers, the work offers an important lesson. We often think that meaning resides in what is said. Sala reminds us that meaning also resides in what can no longer be said.
In the missing sentence.
In the forgotten language.
In the gap between an image and its explanation.
In the distance between memory and understanding.
At first glance, this might seem like a technical accident. Yet the entire work unfolds from this absence. A mouth continues to move. Gestures remain visible. Conviction remains visible. History remains visible. But language has disappeared. This disappearance transforms the film into something uncanny.
Sala does not simply accept this loss. He begins an investigation. Through professional lip-readers from a school for the deaf, he attempts to reconstruct what his mother once said. The work therefore becomes a search. Not only for missing words. But for a lost relationship between language, memory, and history.
As the reconstruction progresses, another absence emerges.
His mother herself can no longer remember her speech.
The young woman speaking passionately on the screen and the older woman watching the footage decades later no longer share the same political language, the same convictions, perhaps not even the same understanding of reality.
This is where the work becomes particularly moving. Because the silence is no longer simply technological. It becomes historical. Existential.
What happens when a person survives their own ideology?
What happens when the language that once organized an entire world loses its meaning?
What remains when the words are recovered but the belief behind them has disappeared?
The film reveals something uncomfortable about memory: we often imagine forgetting as the disappearance of information. But forgetting is also the disappearance of context. Sometimes we remember the words while losing the world that made those words meaningful.
This is particularly visible in societies that have undergone profound political transformation. Entire generations may discover that the language through which they once understood reality no longer functions. Slogans remain. Speeches remain. Images remain. But belief does not.
Meaning fractures. A gap appears between past and present.
Intervista inhabits this gap.
This is why I do not primarily see the film as a work about memory. I see it as a work about historical silence. A silence that appears after an ideology collapses. A silence that remains when history moves on but its traces continue to inhabit bodies, families, and memories. A silence between generations. A silence between who we were and who we have become.
For writers, the work offers an important lesson. We often think that meaning resides in what is said. Sala reminds us that meaning also resides in what can no longer be said.
In the missing sentence.
In the forgotten language.
In the gap between an image and its explanation.
In the distance between memory and understanding.
creative writing exercises
For this exercise, choose one thing that will remain absent from the text. This absence will become the center of the writing.
Write for 20–30 minutes.
Your task is not to describe the absent element directly. Instead, write only what surrounds it.
Focus on traces, consequences, reactions, fragments, peripheral details, gaps, interruptions, and echoes.
Build the text so that the reader gradually understands that something important is missing.
Throughout the writing:
– never name the absent element
– never explain it
– never resolve it
– allow the silence to structure the text
Pay attention to what happens when information is withheld.
What becomes more visible?
What acquires weight?
What begins to circulate around the absence?
Like Anri Sala's Intervista, work with the gap itself. Let the silence become an active presence rather than an empty space.
The challenge of this exercise is to resist filling the void.
Trust the unsaid.
Trust the missing part.
Trust that absence can organize an entire text.
Write for 20–30 minutes.
Your task is not to describe the absent element directly. Instead, write only what surrounds it.
Focus on traces, consequences, reactions, fragments, peripheral details, gaps, interruptions, and echoes.
Build the text so that the reader gradually understands that something important is missing.
Throughout the writing:
– never name the absent element
– never explain it
– never resolve it
– allow the silence to structure the text
Pay attention to what happens when information is withheld.
What becomes more visible?
What acquires weight?
What begins to circulate around the absence?
Like Anri Sala's Intervista, work with the gap itself. Let the silence become an active presence rather than an empty space.
The challenge of this exercise is to resist filling the void.
Trust the unsaid.
Trust the missing part.
Trust that absence can organize an entire text.
Photo: Anna Ádám