Quiet Not Absent — Alberto Anhaus X Seeyousound

In collaboration with
SEEYOUSOUND™ International Music Film Festival
Special mention of Premio Recontemporary 2025

The exhibition by artist Alberto Anhaus, titled Quiet Not Absent, is the result of a collaboration between Seeyousound and Recontemporary. Following the installation Colonization Sea Invasion at the 2023 Venice Biennale and numerous international exhibitions, Quiet Not Absent marks Alberto Anhaus’s first-ever solo show.

The exhibition unfolds as an expanded listening environment: an invitation to move through landscapes that are usually invisible and to perceive what operates beneath the surface, far from the gaze and centrality of the human. As Aldo Leopold suggested as early as 1949, landscape here is not understood as an image or a backdrop, but as an evolutionary and ecological process. Biological phenomena, made perceptible through sound and material, become an active part of the exhibition experience, stepping away from their role as mere scenery for human life.

Brought into dialogue with one another, the works construct a sensitive ecosystem that challenges established hierarchies and invites the audience to engage with non-anthropocentric modes of perception. Listening, in this context, implies a shift: slowing down, suspending visual attention, and accepting a more discreet presence within the space. It means listening to what normally remains silent, entering into contact with subtle, subterranean, or more-than-human phenomena.

Sound acts as a living material: it traverses surfaces and bodies, rendering audible—and at times tactile—phenomena that usually escape attention. In this scenario, listening becomes an active and situated gesture, one that requires time, proximity, and a willingness to renegotiate one’s role within the environment. The installations transform the exhibition space into a threshold: a transitional site where what is alive, transforming, or decomposing continues to produce signals.

Alberto Anhaus’s works move across different temporal, spatial, and organic scales: from the microcosm of insects and vegetal growth to the vibrations of an apparently inert material such as glass. The composition of these elements aligns imagination and perception, suggesting a possible coexistence with temporalities and processes that usually remain at the margins of human experience. Visitors are invited to traverse and temporarily inhabit these landscapes not as external observers, but as guests within a shared ecosystem, open to the presence of other species and other forms of life.

Entomology presents itself as a fragile, pulsating sonic habitat—a resonant membrane that translates the natural landscape into an intimate, almost secret electronic murmur. Descending beneath the surface, Mdrrrolding makes perceptible the constant human interference in vegetal growth processes, through vibrations that act as invisible yet decisive forces. In Organico, time manifests as sensory matter: sounds and smells accompany the process of organic transformation and decay, revealing how forms of life persist even in decomposition. Sottobosco imagines a possible future subsoil in which natural organisms and technological remnants coexist, proposing a non-human perspective on the landscape.

The exhibition invites permeability: to draw closer, to allow oneself to be traversed by organic and technological matter, and to recognize one’s position within a fragile yet deeply interconnected ecosystem. In an era marked by an overproduction of signals and noise, the exhibition proposes an exercise in radical listening—an act of attention toward what grows, transforms, and resists at the margins of perception, questioning our role and responsibility within the contemporary landscape.

Text by Chiara Boitani
Curated by Alessandro Maccarrone