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She is known as an architect of anti-sound and master of disconnection. Sarah van Sonsbeeck portrays silence, and makes us aware of its lack. She is one of the nominees for the Volkskrant Art Prize that is awarded in the spring of the year. If you look through the window in Sarah van Sonsbeeck’s studio, what you catch is a partial view of the Museumplein. Well-kept grass, a few tree branches, and the occasional tram passing by with a clanging sound. ‘I mostly look out of my window,’ she tells me. Sarah van Sonsbeeck (b. 1976) was trained as an architect. She was also working as one, until she decided art was her true calling. She started taking evening classes at the Rietveld Academy, where her teachers urged her to put drawing aside and incorporate her work practice into her art. ‘Otherwise they would have flunked me,’ she says. Sarah followed her teachers’ advice, and the result was How My Neighbours Became Buildings (2006), a piece addressing a noise problem in terms of living space and, finally, in terms of monthly rent. By claiming some of her rent back from her loud neighbours, she was not only exploring space but also isolating one of her main obsessions for the coming years: silence. How My Neighbours Became Buildings formed the conceptual framework for the work she would subsequently make, for example during a residency at the Rijksakademie.

Physicality

Some of Van Sonsbeeck’s pieces remind me of artists like Monica Bonvicini or Alberto Garutti, and definitely her attention for negative spaces has inherited something from Rachel Whiteread’s famous sculptures. But her aesthetics are very different, simple and dry: objects, photos, and texts – all clean and minimal, but without coming across as cold. Van Sonsbeeck’s installations have a subtlety to them that makes them poetic, but also a potentially practical rationality that is possibly a heritage from the artist’s architecture days. There is often irony behind a Van Sonsbeeck piece, since its conception might stem from banal daily routines, such as doing dishes. But maintaining such a transparent and personal connection to each piece helps her work feel warmer.One of the artist’s most iconic pieces is One Cubic Meter of Broken Silence (2009), a glass case originally exhibited in a public space and coincidentally vandalized. Now it looks way more dramatic than it used to, and it works even better. Van Sonsbeeck has represented the same concept (isolating silence, not vandalism) in another piece: a small, vacuum-sealed steel cube, connected to a pair of headphones that allow the listener to experience ‘anti-sound’. Sound – or lack thereof – aside, the artist has also produced architectural pieces, like a 1:1 reproduction of her home – that is, of all the space inside it that remains invisible to the outside gaze. This notion of silence and private space as a primary resource brings us back to the view from her studio window, which also informs her most recent works.Being inspired by influential pillars like Gordon Matta-Clark and John Cage – and by her personal hero Job Koelewijn – Van Sonsbeeck’s objects sometimes echo existing visions. She doesn’t mind, though, and is in fact fascinated by the way objects may appear multiple times across history, with different purposes. Also, as somebody who got into contemporary art relatively late, Van Sonsbeeck is very aware that not everybody is familiar with the codes and lingos of the white cube. ‘If my father cannot understand a piece, it means it doesn’t work.’ Sarah’s father is an astrophysicist. On one occasion – when she was in the German town of Mönchengladbach for a residency – he helped her engineer a special mirror to reflect the sunlight from the other side of the street towards her apartment window, flashing her a message in Morse code (‘Keep up the good work’).

Absolute Silence

Recently, Van Sonsbeeck’s fascination with materials and her obsession with silence have effectively converged. It all started with the Faraday Bag (2011) – named after the English physicist – which Van Sonsbeeck created for Alicia Framis’s Moon Life Concept Store. The bag is made with an electromagnetic-shielding fabric that makes it impenetrable to Wi-Fi and telephone networks. After mapping the silent areas in her house unreached by her neighbours’ gaze, the artist is now looking for the silence that lies out of reach from the impalpable waves that keep us connected all the time. A communicational hermitage, matching a sensual feel for materials (silver paint, the touch of fabric) with the conceptual knot of her work: a refuge from the clutter of daily communication, a space that is truly personal. After the bag, the artist has been tackling a Faraday Tent (2011), and maybe in the future she’ll be able to apply the same principle to a whole room, painting it all silver and making it permanently inaccessible to modern communication technology. What fascinates her is also the drastic component in this gesture: once painted with the special insulating chemical, the room would not go back to normal unless somebody painstakingly scraped it all off (‘Like the crack Doris Salcedo made in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, it leaves a scar’).Van Sonsbeeck will be quite busy in the next months. When we talked, she was thinking about her piece for the upcoming Volkskrant Art Prize, and in June she’ll go back to Istanbul – where she recently spent a three-month residency – for another exhibition. She’s full of ideas about it, like the Blackout Room – a place where movement makes the lights go off – and the Istanbul Silence Tour, a guided walk through those urban pockets that are tucked away from human traffic, despite being close to Istanbul’s crowded city centre.One of Van Sonsbeeck’s most recent artworks, featured in the Afterlife show at the Uitvaartmuseum in Amsterdam, is titled Moment of Bliss (2011). ‘There is no concept,’ she tells me. ‘I just recreated the reflection of the sunset on my window.’ Installed as it is, in the corner of a big room, the light installation is very discreet. It goes on and off, slowly, investing the glass wall with a red-tinted shade of light, a promising interpretation of the afterlife.Nicola Bozzi is a freelance writer based in Amsterdam/Milan