The King of Silence

In a tribute concert to the Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire held in 1985, a multidisciplinary musician whose name is unknown to us and who signed his name as Tres (“three”, that is, the day he was born) decided to dedicate all his work to the poetics of silence. Since then, he has turned to silence as absence, as protest, and as a language in his sound performances, art interventions, and guerrilla art installations. With visual references such as James Lee Byars and Joseph Beuys, sounds such as John Cage, poetics such as William S. Burroughs and Stéphane Mallarmé, and theorists such as Susan Sontag, Tres leaves a record of silence. His intimate actions include emptying copies of a newspaper of content by piercing their pages with tiny holes, stamping a silent letter with a printing stamp, making art interventions on images of his poetic and artistic references, turning a pair of scissors into a tool with which to cut silence, or writing a verse from Mallarmé’s poem, A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance, in braille above the poet’s portrait. "In a verbally incontinent society there is no room for silence," Tres argued.