Hałas

What is peace and quiet today? Can we attain it, preserve it, protect it? And in the future – will we still be able to? When our reality this week is different from what it was last week and different from what it will be next week? And when there is no chance we can adapt to it fast enough? Will the excess of stimuli bombarding our nervous systems ever stop, retreat, let go?

Or perhaps, if we want to survive in a state of relative balance, we need to lock ourselves in sensory deprivation chambers or... learn how to protect ourselves from it all. Now. On our own. For our own sake.

Perhaps effectively protecting our own nervous systems will soon become one of the most important and most difficult skills to master. Perhaps it already is. Perhaps before long, new university programmes will emerge, awarding graduates the title of “Master of Silence”.

Let’s not allow our phones to devour us, or corporations as powerful as states to carve neural pathways into our brains that will ultimately lead us far away from ourselves. Let’s change that. Starting tomorrow. And together.

I want information overload to be taxed. I want the practice of separating us from ourselves to become illegal.

I want animals and trees to take over the world. I want meadows to grow in cities, and I want us not to be afraid of one another. I want us to have no names. I want us to greet each other by saying, “don’t rush”. […] I want everyone to be able to be, and to be, a philosopher. And I want the feminine form “filozofka” to sound just as dignified as the masculine “filozof”. I want sentences that come from the gut to matter more than sentences that come from the head.
(Małgorzata Halber, Hałas [Noise], Cyranka Publishing House, Warsaw 2024)

The performance is a one-person story about trying to cope with sensory overload and fighting for a sense of personal peace. It combines visual art, puppet animation, spoken word and live music.