S for Silence Tres, the Catalan Banksy
In 1985, in a tribute concert to the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire, a multidisciplinary musician whose name is unknown and goes by the handle of Tres (three, being the date of his birth), decided to dedicate all his work to the poetics of silence. Since then, in sound performances, manipulated objects and guerrilla installations, silence has been used as absence, as protest and as language. With references such as visual artists James Lee Byars and Joseph Beuys, musicians such as John Cage, poets such as William S. Burroughs and Stéphane Mallarmé, and theorists such as Susan Sontag, Tres creates silence. Among his more intimate actions, he emptied copies of a newspaper by piercing its pages with tiny holes, printed an H (a silent letter in Spanish) with an ink stamp, turned a pair of scissors into a tool to cut the silence, and wrote in Braille a verse from Mallarmé's poem A throw of the dice will never abolish chance on a portrait of the poet. ‘In a verbally incontinent society, there is no room for silence’, argues Tres. You can see his works in the MACBA Collection exhibition.
Works in the collection by Tres
