Le parole del silenzio / The words of silence
Have you ever wondered, when you are listening to someone, whether you can truly understand what they are thinking and feeling? Whether you understand not only their words but also, and more importantly, their silences? Understanding means listening not only to words but also to silence, in order to understand the meaning of it, because the dialectics of silence is no less effective than the dialectics of language. It is likewise true that understanding means knowing how to listen, and effective listening requires not only effort and attention but also, and especially, silence.
This is the message we are aiming to convey to young people using the expressive power of body language. The goal, among other things, is to make them understand that silence is our key tool for listening with empathy, enabling us to share the other person’s emotional perception and to understand their inner world without making it our own. That way, interpersonal and group communication becomes a relationship with both ourselves and the other person because silence speaks, communicates and enables us to listen to others and to ourselves, and to recognize thoughts and emotions, those of others as well as our own. In such a radically digitalized world, where young people live under the spell of the “web” and its key focus on the kind of sharing that consumes their relational and affective life, haste and impatience hinder the development of an individual identity, which instead requires introspective reflection and mental processing.
The schools participating in the project were Liceo Classico ‘Ludovico Ariosto’ and ITC ‘Città del Tricolore’.
