Coming from a family of musicians, Elise ’t Hart (1991) has a natural appreciation of the importance and presence of music and sound. Both during her preliminary training at the Codarts Rotterdam Conservatory and at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht, she developed into a sound artist combining music, sound and visual art.
In 2013, she founded Instituut voor Huisgeluid, a growing collection and documentation of sounds heard around the house. This ranges from creaky floorboards to the hum of the fridge, from the clicking of a radiator to water crashing from the shower, to the whirr of the range hood, birdsong, the squeaking of a sliding door, or the ring of a doorbell. Some of these sounds have positive connotations or a soothing familiarity, while others are downright irritating.
“Obscùlta”: this Latin word for “Listen” opens the Rule of Saint Benedict. Over the past months, I’ve had the opportunity to spend five days living with the nuns at Onze Lieve Vrouwe Abbey in Oosterhout. I was allowed to listen in, to look around, eat with them, read with them, sing with them, work with them and record the sounds of the monastic life. I spent my first two days exclusively observing, ears pricked up, eyes peeled, pen and paper in hand. Sister Martha, the abbess of the monastery, took me under her wing as she showed me the colours and sounds of their way of life. I’m still struggling to put this experience into words.
A project about sound,
which turned out to be about silence,
but then turned into being about the sentences reverberating through the silence.
Because when you listen to a moment of silence, what do you hear?
For a long time, I perceived silence as a kind of no man’s land between two sounds. Just like in music, which can have rests between two instances of sound. In cases like this, the silence serves a clear purpose, such as separating two notes or building tension for what’s about to come. Whereas silence marks a hiatus in my everyday life and work (sometimes as an awkward pause, sometimes in a beautiful way), the monastic life gave silence a whole new meaning. It’s not a moment in between, a rest, an afterthought, or a void. Here, silence is the main event. Silence is when the magic happens: it enables you to listen. To listen to others, to listen to yourself, to listen to something beyond yourself or another; to a voice, to an outside force or higher power. In a monastery, life is as silent as possible.
I often found my silence in my cell or in church. After the tolling of Scholastica and/or Hildegard (not the names of nuns, but of bells!), service started: the vigil (6.00 AM), lauds (7.30 AM), mass (9.30 AM), nones (2.00 PM), vespers (5.00 PM) and compline (8.15 PM). Submerged in the silence of the church before the service begins, you can hear everything: a suppressed cough, my pen scribbling in my notebook, the pew, the rustling of paper, the jingling of a key. The reverberations and acoustics of the building give everything a grand sound: a little creak (krk) becomes a great rupture (KRK). It this process happens as much internally as it does externally. Each little thought grows in size as it gets reflected in every direction. And then, the silence is broken: a match is lit and the nuns enter – habits rustle, shoes squeak, books are opened. After that, you are united in silence, prayer or song: Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
After the services, I would usually set out with one of the nuns as we searched for the sounds that tell of monastic life. We found all sorts of things: creaky doors, rattling keys, croaking frogs, the Lord’s Prayer, scuffing chairs, a buzzing mobility scooter, jingling cutlery, a ticking timepiece, rustling books, a clicking refrigeration door, a ringing censer, and so much more. Situated between these sounds and silences were conversations between things like (religious) art, music, household noise, life paths, both the sisters’ and mine, and the sacredness of the everyday. Meanwhile, the ticking that marked the passage of time, both literally and figuratively, was ever present. Spending time alone here, accepting an entirely new experience, the conversations we had, the openness of the nuns, sisterhood, singing together and making recordings of this experience: it’s all been so overwhelming, almost too much for my eyes, ears and heart to take in.
Now, in silence, I’m trying to put words to paper. My thoughts are looking for words as my hands type the letters, hoping to write something that touches on how I feel (if only tangentially). This is an experience I will take into the next year. A year in which I will return again for conversation, the sounds, the recordings and the silence, to help you experience something during the h3h biennial, something that will whisk you away, tell you a tale, stir up a feeling, leave you amazed, make you listen…
