The Blackouts by Tres or how to turn Everything off

’The building is important, and the condition is that it has to be turned off completely, with a cut-off at the end’, wrote Tres in a letter to me when we were planning the possibility of organising a new Blackout some time ago. So there are no concessions, no simulacra but a real blackout, an effective shutdown of productivity, a momentaneous death. A glance at the list of all the European premises and buildings that Tres switched off between 2000 and 2016 confirms that indeed the choice of place is not trivial. Among other spaces dedicated to the production of music and sound, Sidecar and the Auditorium represent two opposite ways of understanding and experiencing music in Barcelona. They are accompanied by a long list of art centres, museums and other organisations whose activity revolves around the image and visual culture, such as Hangar centre of artistic production, Idep Higher School of Image and Design, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), the former Centre d’Art Santa Mònica and the extinct Mediateca of “la Caixa” exhibition hall (now CaixaForum) in Barcelona, and other spaces throughout Spain such as Centro Cultural Matadero in Huesca, Arteleku in San Sebastian, Azcuna Centroa in Bilbao and CA2M in Móstoles, Madrid, the city where Tres also switched off La Casa Encendida, in a charmingly ironic gesture and play on words.

We therefore establish that silence as an auditory phenomenon is often cleverly associated in Tres’s work with darkness, warning us that in a society that is so pervaded by images, noise is as acoustic as it is photogenic, and that all forms of generating silence involve a strategy of resistance to the image. There is probably no better example of this than Tres’s ’balls of silence’. Made of Cinefoil or black wrap, a material that shuts out all light, they plunge all these temples of art, these spaces dedicated to the production of visual meaning, into darkness. Tres was perhaps questioning the place of the image in contemporary society, inviting us to rethink the role that art centres should play in this hyper-visual age. What is the place of the artistic image in such a bright and noisy world? How can we promote forms of critical thought from the visual sphere? Tres posed strategies for opacity and for the attainment of silence that may enable us to ratify the function of art and perhaps even also protect some of the liberties that have been restricted by surveillance and control systems in pursuit of a presumably safer society.

It is interesting to note that long before Tres’s Blackouts, the city of Barcelona had suffered several other power cuts. During the Spanish Civil War, lights were switched off and homes and inhabited areas were darkened at night-time as a defence strategy to combat the aggressive air raids launched against the city, making it difficult for the enemy air force to find its targets. We are no longer bombed from the air but we now face other threats, more concealed and less noisy. It is also apposite to remember that Tres’s first Blackout took place in a Barcelona cybercafe in 2000, a time when the world of the Internet still aroused naïve enthusiasm and the belief that it could become a tool for empowering democracy. Five years later, Tres switched off the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC for its initials in Spanish), the largest Spanish public institution in its field, chiefly dedicated ’to developing and promoting research in benefit of scientific and technological progress’. [5] Tres’s Blackouts rendered inoperative the lamps, xero-copying machines, alarm systems, surveillance cameras, emergency lights and circulation of metadata, reminding us that it is not darkness and silence that make us vulnerable, but rather this society of noise and constant light in which everything is visible, everything is monitored and everything is recorded. Perhaps the blackouts are the only possible defence strategy we have at our disposal.