Zane Austill
Zane Austill
Silent Correspondence
1, 2, 3, & 4
looping video installations (15 minutes each)
On October 28th, 2021, I decided to stop talking. I began what I thought was a journey to cultivate a stronger connection with myself and the world through silence. I wanted to improve my Zen Buddhist practice and quiet a spiteful voice that was growing within me. What I didn’t realize was that there’s a seismic difference in outer silence and inner silence. Outer silence is just a technique, but my practice, embedded as it was within a typical American life (surrounded by American culture, going to school, working, and spending time with friends) didn’t bring forth any great understanding of inner silence. But strange roads did present themselves along the way of this misguided path, and I was there to document it with my camcorder and by writing letters to my friends and family. I assembled selections from my letters along with my camcorder footage to create these four sequential looping videos. To view the videos in order, walk around the monitors clockwise.
Things I wrote about a lot: myself, being depressed, break ups, movies, coffee, tea, George Bush, trains, death, books, parties, conversations, people watching, hatred, my friends, marriage, romance, love, jokes, guilt, dreams, nature, travel, deja vu, getting old, home, saying goodbye, Bong Joon Ho’s breakfast, my new fountain pen, parents, time, wishes, Liverpool’s potential quadruple, weed, sobriety, fear, the state of Maine, dreams, failure, anxiety, self-reflection, Zen Buddhism, Drive My Car, high school, the beach, being sorry, and The Always Sunny In Philadelphia podcast. I should have added a spoiler warning before that paragraph. Forget you read any of that. Oh, I wrote about forgetfulness a lot, too. One thing I didn’t write much about: silence. Go figure.