Fact: Beyond already loud environments, there is a collective pressure to speak, to express ourselves on social media, to listen to music—individually through earbuds or collectively, as public spaces become increasingly saturated with amplified sound. This is the starting point.
How to respond? By turning toward silence. Silence is not passive; it is a particular form of communication, a pre-linguistic one—a deliberate refusal to participate in constant discourse.
Silence lies at the heart of many religions as a means of connecting with the sacred. While silence itself is not inherently religious, making space for it can bring us closer to what is invisible, intangible, and shared.
I do not want to sell anything. I am not offering an exotic performance. I simply want to listen to the world—carefully, patiently, and collectively.
Silent walking has become a trend on TikTok. But, as with many personal development practices, structural problems are reframed as individual responsibilities. People are exhausted and overwhelmed—too much scrolling, too many distractions, too much of everything. Everyone feels it: our ecologies of attention are under constant pressure. And now people pay for digital detoxes, trying to fix privately what is produced collectively.
In the past, religions also played a role in regulating attention and emotion. Peace and calm were the rewards of prayer.
I call for a secular form of prayer—a prayer without God.
Yet I do not want to present this too directly. Above all, it must remain a collective practice—an emerging community.
This is why I create protest signs: to keep the gesture political without attaching it to a specific political demand. That ambiguity is essential. It must say something without being reduced to a single claim.
There are risks. It may be misread as equating all causes, as if every struggle were the same. Another danger is irony. This is not an ironic action.
The point is not to perform silence. It is to truly gather, as demonstrations do—but around one simple and powerful foundation: silence.
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
