English explanation above the text.

Title: Overdose of Childhood Pain

Format: A nonvisual & Sound piece / sound installation (4 minutes)

Conceptual Description: “Overdose of Childhood Pain” is a sound piece that articulates Baroque music, silence, and fragments of war-related sound to construct a listening space in which the listener’s body becomes a site of ethical resonance.

The work is grounded in a fundamental premise: childhood is always the first victim of war, regardless of sides, ideologies, or geography. In contrast to the visual overexposure of violence in contemporary media, this piece turns to sound as a slow, intimate, and non-spectacular means of approaching trauma.

The structural core of the piece is the Sarabande from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5 in C minor, BWV 1011, interpreted by Hidemi Suzuki. Its tempo, close to 60 BPM—similar to a resting human heartbeat—functions as a physiological and emotional ground, a vital pulse that sustains listening even as conflict-related sounds emerge.

Layered onto this musical foundation are distant explosions, war ambiences, and fragments of children’s cries, treated with extreme dynamic restraint. The work does not seek shock or immersive violence, but rather an ethical friction between musical containment and the intrusion of pain. Volume never overwhelms: harm is suggested, not reproduced.

Silence plays a central role in the composition, understood not as absence but as political material, in dialogue with Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s reflections on silence as a sonic weapon. The alternation between sound and silence avoids any form of acoustic torture and positions the listener as an active participant, compelled to complete the experience through memory and personal sensitivity.

 Artistic Intention: This work does not aim to document or represent a specific conflict, nor does it seek consolation. Its purpose is to suspend the listener in a state of ethical attention, where listening itself becomes an act of responsibility.

The choice of Baroque music is deliberate. Historically associated with order, beauty, and spiritual balance, the music is here traversed by what civilization has persistently failed to prevent. The piece ultimately poses an uncomfortable question:

What kind of humanity are we sustaining while the suffering of children becomes normalized?

“Overdose of Childhood Pain” is conceived for exhibition spaces,(in a Black cube without light), sound art contexts, and festivals, but it also supports an individual headphone-based listening experience, where the encounter becomes almost confessional.