“Abandon This Palace of Language:” On the Rhetoric of the Body in A Yellow Silence

Abstract

This dialogue between Katie Marya and David Winter reflects on A Yellow Silence, a collaborative, sonic, intertextual, outdoor art installation based primarily on the poetry of Alejandra Pizarnik, which Marya created with architects Hilary Weise and Holly R. Craig. Winter participated in the audio recording of texts for the project. Here, Marya and Winter use feminist theory to construct a conversation around the use of silence in this public art piece, and they explore the nature of their own lives in the process of creating it. A Yellow Silence originally showed on Centennial Mall in Lincoln, Nebraska as a part of the Lincoln PoPs: Global Frequencies public art exposition in the fall of 2019. This dialogue is intentionally formatted without name markers as a way to disrupt normative assumptions about identity and authorship, and to reflect the fluidity that existed as Marya and Winter talked and wrote. This formal choice was based on Haneen Ghabra and Bernadette Marie Calafell’s essay “From failure and allyship to feminist solidarities: negotiating our privileges and oppressions across borders.