Green Fuse, Claire Milbrath, Pangée, 18 January – 1 March 2025

A day drags endless to its close;
While years like arrows flown
Pass fleeting by and snatch away
All values that we own;
—Taras Shevchenko, Three Years

گردن (Gardan), xodkaar x No Cosmos, Bandcamp (Self-released)

Noise is the common auditory denominator of the postmodern experience.

Escaping the constant, ambient din of traffic, sirens, construction, beeping machinery, droning screens, and ubiquitous music is practically impossible in any urban metropolis. Even amidst supposedly silent settings, there is always somewhere an air conditioner buzzing, a 60Hz grounding hum, a faucet dripping, a compressor running. Just try and find a quiet place in the city and you will inevitably encounter some sort of noise instead.

Talking is one of the most ever-present forms of metropolitan noise. There is hardly a place to go for humans to be together in silence. Libraries, perhaps, are supposed to be void of conversation. But they seldom are. Empty churches are pregnant with impending sound.

Whispering is arguably noisier than talk at regular volume, our ears attuned to stifled speech in order to catch some meaning, wet s’s and popping p’s exploding in volume in contrast to the airy whispered utterance.

We feel the need to express the minutiae of emotion and experience. But love emerges in the silence between people. As Quentin Tarantino wrote for his character Mia Wallace to observe in the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, “‎That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special. When you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.”

Silence is empty sonic space. And the postmodern subject seems ill at ease with the notion of emptiness. Into emptiness creeps uncertainty and the potential for psychic rupture. And so, we fill our spaces with objects, activity, noise, and chatter.

It is ironic that a preferred term to describe a forceful verbal expression is “sounding off.”

Approximately 760 kg of Public Property, Pedro Barbáchano, Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, 18 November 2024 – 16 February 2025

The 2003 National Film Board documentary entitled Totem: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole tells the absurd and frustrating tale of a totem pole that was ostensibly stolen from the Haisla people in so-called British Columbia in the late 1920s, and the community’s ultimately fruitless efforts to repatriate it from a Swedish museum where it eventually ended up.

The Haisla first produce a replica pole to replace the original. But efforts stall when the village is unable to raise enough funds to build a space that could adequately preserve the relic — one of the Swedes’ conditions to relinquish it.

Of course, preservation is antithetical to Haisla tradition anyway, totem poles traditionally erected with the understanding that they will inevitably decompose, along with everything else, back into the earth.

The film is a story about the location of power in western society, and the imposition of arbitrary values on diverse and marginal cultures. Posterity and reverence are neither universal nor measurable concepts that we can impose upon or transfer from one society to another.

When something of value is taken from a nation — whether treasure or territory — only those people are capable of experiencing its loss.

Tchaikovsky’s Lustrous Violin Concerto, Sergey Khachatryan with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique, 20 February 2025

In the autumn of 1933, around 117,000 Russian peasants, mostly volunteers, began to arrive in eastern and southern Ukraine to repopulate and “Russify” Ukrainian geographic areas that Stalin’s forced famine-genocide, known as Holodomor, had devastated. These Russian settlers were under the impression that their presence was necessary and that they would be welcomed with transportation, food, and fertile land.

But many of them experienced a contrasting reality upon arrival: eerily empty villages, infestations of mice in the farmhouses and fields, and linguistic hostility from the locals who remained. Then, they were subjected to milk and meat taxes, and as a result of hardship upon hardship, most of this first wave returned to Russia by 1935.

However, second and third waves followed in 1935 and ’36, and they were not voluntary. Secret police officers and locals were enlisted to prevent the new Russian arrivals from escape. Ukrainian-language theatres were closed, and the performance of Ukrainian music was restricted to only three cities: Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odessa. The Donbas region, according to Sergio Gradenigo, the Italian diplomat in Kharkiv, was undergoing rapid cultural replacement at the level of policy.

The enforced influx of Russian nationals into eastern Ukraine ensured the generational success of “fifth columns,” clandestine agitators from within who interfered with and undermined Ukrainian authority in the region. Nonetheless, by 1991, more than 80% of the Donbas’s residents supported Ukrainian independence from the former Soviet Union.

Yet, as industries were privatized following the collapse of state-run enterprise, corruption and consolidation of wealth and power resulted in Russian oligarchies that took control of the Donbas and further destabilized it. By March 2014, pro-Russian demonstrations escalated into a war between Ukrainian national and Russian-supported separatist forces.

29 ceasefires have been declared since then, with none of them abating the conflict.

This process began in the early 1930s with the intentional starvation of Ukrainian peasants and Stalin’s forced migration of poverty-stricken Russians to replace them. Has this war been going on for three years, or 100?

Judy, Jeremy Young, Cablcar (Halocline Trance)

Bullies crave attention.

It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad attention, just so long as they are the centre of it. As well, giving bullies the silent treatment can too often have the opposite of its intended effect, enraging them to lash out even more aggressively, demanding that they receive their due response.

As the old axiom goes, violence begets violence. But what strategy to deploy when silence begets violence? You can’t outshout a loudmouth. But you can withstand bullies with bravery.

The world just witnessed a masterclass in expert perseverance.◼︎

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_{Cover image: Claire Milbrath, Green Fuse, gallery view. Photographed for NicheMTL}