Paris 1991–1992: A series of eight untitled works
FRAGMENTATION OF THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BODY-for the transient with few ties to his history or nation, for the migrant with little claim to any continuing identity, quotation is perhaps the only way to articulate one's peripheral, partial and intermittent presence in the discourses of culture. And this is because a fragmented and detached lifestyle is already quotation, a combination, redistribution, mobile, intersecting and plural use of culture.Nelly Richard , "Love in Quotes", Hysterical Tears: Juan Davila, ed. Paul Taylor, Victoria,1985
The initial photographs for The Voice of Silence were taken at a number of different 'cultural' sites in Paris. lngeborg Tyssen's selection of anonymous 'relics', images from Antiquity, copies, originals, pieces, details, fragments and shards of figures, columns and drapery, when seen from a colonial perspective, echoes the weight and collapse of European influence. In this body of work, Tyssen focusses on the idea of perceived cultural experience; starting with original material, she imposes a process of re-assemblage which although analogous to memory is highly formalized.
On one level the work questions the idea of the cultural pilgrimage-that journey which can only be made by someone apparently (dis)located or displaced from the centre of a particular cultural heritage/civilization. Inherent in this journey is the suggestion that through a physical proximity to these 'objects' it is possible to be relocated or at least to come to understand one's own position in time and history.
Contained within a single frame, each pair of photographs has a synergistic effect. The two images often complement and parallel each other, 'making up' missing parts or reinforcing a suggested feeling in the other. In pairs they also manifest the notion