Blue Silence
| Year: | 2025 |
| City: | Vienna, Austria |
| Measures: | 134 x 134 cm |
| Media: | Embroidery on Dupioni silk |
| Projects: |
A body drifting in the sea, almost invisible. The silk remembers what the water erases.
In June 2025, Sea-Watch published a photograph taken by its reconnaissance crew over the Mediterranean Sea. It shows the lifeless body of a man who did not survive his journey to Europe. He drowned and was left drifting in the sea – an image for the many dead who vanish each day between Libya and Europe, rarely seen or acknowledged.
Tanja Boukal translates this photograph into a quilt of blue silk. On 135 x 135 centimeters unfolds a precious, seemingly endless surface, within which, in one corner, appears the small outline of a dead man. The work transforms brutal reality into a fragile fabric of beauty and silence. The blue evokes the sea that carries and consumes, embodying vastness, indifference, and forgetting.
“Blue Silence” is a gesture of remembrance – for a human being without a name, for a life that ended in the sea. The work makes the invisible visible and asks how we face the silence the sea lays over the dead.
