Silence is not the absence of sound; to me, it is a way of perceiving. In Nataša Segulin’s Sounds of Silence, the world is stripped to its essential gestures, and what remains is the inner life of things.

In the forest of Gorjanci, the trunks stand like a congregation of listening bodies. Nothing moves, yet everything is in motion. The light between the trees feels like breath, and looking into this image, one enters a space where the visible and the invisible share the same quiet pulse. It is a silence that gathers rather than empties.

From Strunjan comes an abstraction of sea and boat, lines of white and black slipping across one another with the elegance of calligraphy. The photograph holds the boundary where matter turns to rhythm. The silence here is concentrated, the kind that invites me to lean closer. It recalls what Barthes called the “this, exactly this,” the tautological presence that needs no explanation.

In the monastery of La Rueda, water falls through wooden beams like threads of light drawn through a loom. The world becomes a field of traces, each line a fleeting moment of brightness caught between appearance and disappearance. The silence is not stillness. It is suspension. The sense that time has paused just long enough for us to witness what usually passes unnoticed.

Segulin’s silence is not withdrawal from the world. It is an attunement to its smallest revelations. Her photographs belong to the space described as attention: a waiting without expectation, an openness to what arrives when we stop trying to name it.

Sounds of Silence is a meditation on how light touches the edges of form, how the world reveals itself when nothing is forced, how beauty can appear in the narrowest gap between seeing and feeling.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume

Editor’s Note