Gilded Silence (2025) by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Gilded Silence begins with a slight imbalance. A wooden pedestal is lifted unevenly by an uncoated pebble from Vientiane, Laos, while a gold-coated pebble from Versailles, France, rests at its highest point. The intervention is minimal, almost imperceptible, yet it is enough to unsettle the entire structure.

At the top, a fragile feather rests on the gilded pebble. Through its coating, a modest object is transformed into a symbol of importance, elevated through appearance rather than function.

The two pebbles perform unequal roles. The uncoated pebble from Laos bears weight and sustains the structure, while the gilded pebble from Versailles receives visibility and symbolic value. One supports silently; the other accumulates prestige through surface and display. Their relationship reflects long-standing asymmetries in how resources, labour, and authority are distributed between centres of power and their margins.

The feather carries the inscription, “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten,” introducing memory as a fragile disturbance within this arrangement. A marginal historical trace remains in the background: Marie Antoinette once kept an African Grey parrot, an emblem of imperial luxury and exotic display, whose fate disappeared into silence after her execution. This forgotten presence links spectacle, accumulation, and political collapse to processes of erasure.

Gilded Silence exposes how power is sustained through surface, hierarchy, and selective forgetting, turning fragility itself into a condition of permanence.