Blackout

It all started with a letter to my father. It had been about ten years since his death, and I suddenly felt like writing to him about the silence, his silence, the silence between us. It started in 2020, as a necessity. The silence, then, was striking. It resonated with other erased voices, other voids, other emotions. I thought I would not be able to stop. Neither diary, nor essay, nor short story, Blackout is a weaving, a braid made of these lines of silence, and tells, in fragments, the story of a dispossession, of an entry into darkness. — YCT

‘A moving account of a son’s search for his father’s ghost, as well as a riveting enquiry into the notions of silence and absence in music, literature and visual art. Extraordinary.’ – Jude Cook

‘A haunting, delicately woven elegy; a luminous act of love written into the void. Let it draw you in. Let it speak to your own silences.’ – Suzanne Joinson

Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.

Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.

Taking inspiration from Emily Dickinson, the White Paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jean-Antoine Watteau’s depiction of poor Pierrot, John Cage, Vija Celmins’s ocean drawings, the music criticism of David Toop and the theoretical writings of, among others, Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben and Paul B. Preciado, as well as from the recent global pandemic, Chateigné Tytelman invites readers to tarry with the void at the heart of modern society and to confront the spectres of death and disease among us.

Yann Chateigné Tytelman is an author and art curator living in Brussels. He has been curator at the KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels, head of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Geneva, and chief curator at CAPC in Bordeaux, among other positions. He is a guest lecturer in the Curatorial Studies programme at KASK & Conservatorium, Gent. In 2023, he co-founded Celador, an art space run by a reading group collective, in Brussels.