Lucia Gregorová Stach (1975) is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art, particularly of the 1960s and 1970s. She researches performative and intermedia art in Central and Eastern Europe and is partly engaged in art theory, the history and future of exhibition-making, and new museology. She worked at the Slovak National Gallery as a senior curator, managing the Collection of Other Media. She is the author and co-author of numerous exhibitions and publications, including Adamčiak, BEGIN! (SNG Bratislava, 2017; Ľ. Fulla Gallery, 2018, with M. Murin); Jana Želibská – Swan Song Now (Czech and Slovak Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale, 2017); and the long-term exhibition Model: Museum of Contemporary Art (SNG Bratislava, 2024).

What happens when experimental music and sound art resonate within a shared space? When listening becomes not just a mode of perception, but also a way of living: a poetics and a politics? The discussion in Trenčín takes place as part of the first joint event of the úúú and pssst, organized by the ooo collective as part of Trenčín 2026. One of them focuses on acoustic ecology and sound art, the other on contemporary and experimental music. On this day, they meet in a shared time and space, where they can touch, intertwine, and enrich one another. They merge in deep listening, in sound and in silence, where music becomes space and space becomes music. Artists, musicians, and performers working across these fields compose both individually and with the landscape, treat sound as material, and record what would otherwise remain unheard. Together, we will reflect on listening as a creative, embodied, and environmental gesture – listening both solitary and shared, individual and communal. To listen actively means to enter the structure of sound, the vibration of the voice, the breath of the landscape. The discussion Art Is (Not Only) Silence offers a glimpse into this shared terrain. A space where artistic practices connect not through style but through sensitivity: to nature, to community, to the future. Listeners become performers. Silence is not emptiness or absence, but a condition of understanding. The words of the British-Indian poet Bhanu Kapil – “You are not alone in this. Gather around the connecting seam…” – inspire further questions: What kinds of environments – sonic, social, ecological – can emerge when we listen together and attentively? What do we wish, and not wish, to bring into the world again through sound? And what forms of relationship can arise when listening becomes not only a sense or a means, but also a place in which we dwell?

Guests: Štefan Szabó, Csilla Nagy, Slávo Krekovič, Eva Vozárová, Fero Király