We conceive of landscape as an individual experience, we feel the environment that surrounds us, we experience space-territory in a personal way, loaded with senses and memories, with commonplace moments; but at the same time we need the public gaze of a social landscape capable of validating the meaning of our personal development.p>

This 2nd Biennial of the Canary Islands has taken as its starting point the concept of “silence”, a word derived from the latin silere, meaning to keep quiet: to be silent in order to hear better, in order to listen to the sound of the world. Silence in the sense of a space capable of accommodating sounds and absences in this dual appreciation of a social and a personal landscape, the absence of intentional sounds (John Cage). “silence” is also understood as the boundary between growth and development, between production and consumption (collective “silence”). “silence” as an initial premise for making a pause, for perceiving differential elements, for listening to what is usually missed, what goes unnoticed. “silence” as a necessary prerequisite for a perception of the transformations of territory. “silence” to delight the senses and to justify a whole series of multidisciplinary projects. The sphere of silence is replete with sounds that we can discover. The world is an increasingly noisy place, of growing contrasts, where it is more and more difficult for man to relate to nature. It therefore becomes necessary to understand that distancing oneself from “silence” can be dangerous and devastating.

There is no doubt that we have succeeded in dominating nature to an undreamed-of degree, but we have not been capable of dominating our dominion over nature. (Marshall D. Sahlins).

This second Biennial aims to reveal keys to a reading of contemporary thought on the basis of “silence”, a line of reasoning constructed from the interconnection between two simultaneous exhibitions, “Immersions”, being held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and “Scenes and Settings”, taking place in Santa Cruz, Tenerife: two projects engaged in a mutual dialogue, incorporating some of the numerous sounds that inhabit silence. “silence” as a place where we can project a series of questions, where we can explore the patient capacity of human beings to listen to the music of the landscape, to perceive and extract from “silence” the harmony or conflicts in its composition and projects and to discover the shapes of silence (Carmen Pardo).

Man does not invent the landscape, but he is active within it together with nature, in its availability, in its dictates in relation to what man asks of it. (EugenioTurri).

But culture changes, and so do technical resources and relationships with physical forms of territory constantly adapting themselves to people’s needs and interests. To the fact, on the one hand, that space is “physically constructed”, and to universal biological needs. Perhaps these are what we need to recognise as the primary basic requirements for listening to the LANDSCAPE.