Quartz Studio is delighted to present The Great Silence, a special project by Puerto Rico-based artists Jennifer Allora (Philadelphia, USA, 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Havana, Cuba, 1971) who, for the occasion, have made ​​a single channel version of their acclaimed three channel video installation The Great Silence (2014). The video installation, presented for the first time in 2014 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, focuses on the world’s largest single aperture radio telescope, located in Esperanza (Hope), Puerto Rico, which transmits and captures radio waves to and from the farthest edges of the universe. The site of the Arecibo Observatory is also home to the last remaining wild population of critically endangered Puerto Rican Parrots, Amazona vittata, who make their habitat in the surrounding Rio Abajo forest. Allora & Calzadilla collaborated with science fiction author Ted Chiang on a subtitled script that explores translation as a device to trace and ponder the irreducible gaps between living, nonliving, human, animal, technological, and cosmic actors. In the spirit of a fable, the subtitled story presents the bird’s observations on humans’ search for life outside this planet, while using the concept of vocal learning- something that both parrots and humans, and few other species have in common- as a source of reflection upon acousmatic voices, ventriloquisms, and the vibrations that form the basis of speech and the universe itself. The text for the film was recently selected for the inclusion in the literary anthologies Best American Science Fiction 2016 and Best American Short Stories 2016.

Jennifer Allora was born in Philadelphia in 1974. Guillermo Calzadilla was born in Havana, Cuba in 1971.   They have been collaborating since 1995. Allora & Calzadilla represented the USA in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011). In 2015 they opened Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos) a site-specific project with Dia Art Foundation in Guayanilla–Peñuelas, Puerto Rico, the institution’s first long-term installation commissioned outside of the continental United States since Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) in Kassel, Germany, in 1982. Their works can be found in museum collections worldwide including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, Pompidou Center, Paris, and Castello di Rivoli, Turin among others. The artists live in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Ted Chiang is the author of Stories of Your Life and Others and The Lifecycle of Software Objects. He was born and raised in Port Jefferson, New York, and attended Brown University, where he received a degree in computer science.  His work has received the John W. Campbell Award, four Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, four Locus Awards, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, a Sidewise Award, and a British Science Fiction Association Award. He lives outside of Seattle, Washington.

Quartz Studio warmly thanks the artists. The exhibition will be open from November 4, 2016 to January 7, 2017, by appointment.