MAYA ATTOUN

Soundless System 

Stainless Still, Plastic, Etching, Photo Etching, Sugar Lift, Aquatint & Embossing on Paper

120X106X32 cm. Table: 90x106x32 cm.  23 Record Covers: 31X31 cm each.

2014

 

Soundless System is a tribute to writer Mary Shelley, daughter of the 19th century, who wrote "Frankenstein" (1818) and in fact initiated the science fiction genre.

 

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein contains the romantic sublime with the ideas of the enlightenment movement. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died in childbirth. she was one of the first feminist  and claimed that the only difference between women and men is education. Her father was a writer and an anarchist. Her husband, the poet Percy Shelley drowned at sea. She kept the remains of his heart until the day she died. In addition, only one of their children survived.

 

The work consists of 23 record covers made ​​in etching, equivalent to the 23 chapters in the book. In addition, I made a textual collaboration with Dr. Oded Wollkstein, translator and essayist on Gothic fiction. The result is text embedded in the etchings rather than a text about the work. 

 

The etchings / records presented on a stainless steel table stand based partly on domestic mid 20th Century record stands and partly on operating table. The viewer is invited to intimately browse, observe and retrieve the record covers to place, thereby producing a constant construction and deconstruction of the images and the story.

 

The images and text appearing on the back of the record covers compiled from various sources, not all significantly associated with the Gothic tradition. In this sense, the work presents the act as do-it-yourself Frankenstein. However, as a proper monster, it performs its manufacturing conditions, and plays for us the failed lab experiment which bore it. 

The Gothic Monster can never be summed to a figure - it embodies the collapse of representation.