Background

Scenes of Silence is based on the great success of Dialogue in the Dark (→ www.dialog-im-dunkeln.de), an installation where blind co-workers lead sighted visitors through a totally dark course that has also been shown in Rendsburg in 2003. This concept and the experience gained from it were widened to include the situation of deaf people.

Scenes of Silence has been continuously developed and improved over the last ten years. In 1997 a first event was staged in Frankfurt. In 2003 the exhibition called „Scènes de Silence“was shown in the Cité des Sciences et l’Industrie (→ www.cite-sciences.fr) in Paris, one of Europe’s most important venues for exhibitions.

Due to the corporation of Andreas Heinecke with Orna Cohen, Thierry Roisin (theatre director at Bitum - France) and Bachir Saifi (deaf actor at the International Visual Theatre - Paris) the exhibition was developed. The overwhelming echo in the media, the poignant entries in the visitors’ books, the interest in  sign language courses as well as many enquiries from other cities proved the power of the concept.