Silence is often described as an absence, yet in Nataša Segulin’s Poetics of Silence it becomes a field of presence. To me, these three photographs from Augsburg, Lignano Sabbiadoro and Sremska Mitrovica show silence not as withdrawal but as a mode of attention, a way of approaching the world without trying to possess it. The images feel as though they are listening.

The blurred window-light in the Augsburg photograph recalls Heidegger’s idea that truth begins in an act of unconcealment. What appears here is not the window but the tremor of illumination it casts. The light becomes a gesture, a soft grid dissolving into a wall, reminding us that perception always arrives through shadows and thresholds. Silence is the condition that allows the trace to appear.

The sand formations from Lignano Sabbiadoro echo Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body as an intertwining of matter and movement. The surface seems alive, shaped by wind and water into folds that resemble both landscape and anatomy. Segulin finds the early trace Andrej Medved describes, in Segulin’s website, the primordial line where form emerges from formlessness. What we see is not erosion, it is transformation.

In the image from Sremska Mitrovica, the small solitary boat crosses a vast expanse of still water, and it reminds me of what Simone Weil suggests, that attention is a form of waiting. The photograph is almost empty, yet the emptiness is full. It gives the boat, and the person within it, a kind of metaphysical gravity. The scene becomes an encounter between the finite and the infinite.

Segulin’s poetics lie in her refusal to impose narrative. Instead, she allows matter, light and distance to speak. Her silence is not mute, it is contemplative. It asks us to slow down, to look again, to recognize that meaning often hides in the smallest inflection of the world. In this way, Poetics of Silence becomes a search for the trace that precedes interpretation, the moment when seeing becomes thought.

These photographs don’t offer answers; they offer openings. The silence within them is the silence of beginnings, of forms emerging, of the world gently revealing itself to anyone willing to stand still long enough to witness it.

Jorge R. G. Sagastume