Withholding is a performative audiovisual installation developed during the summer 2026 Workspace Residency at Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center and presented at Silo City, Buffalo, NY, on September 4th, 2026. 

This project began with a fascination with silos as tools of capitalism: structures the merchant class once used to control markets by storing and withholding vast quantities of grain. Today, they stand as abandoned concrete monuments to an economic logic that has moved on to other bubbles. As an experimental migrant artist, I was drawn to a resonance between these sites and migrant bodies. Both were once desired for their utility, and both now occupy a liminal space of unwantedness. What does it feel like to be left behind by a system once it has moved on from the site and the body that made the system possible in the first place?

I wanted to bring that question into Silo City's Marine A itself, treating the silo not as a backdrop but as a protagonist. Its verticality, circularity, and sealed-off volumes carry a complex social and spatial history. At the center of the piece is an inflatable, pneumatically driven funnel I designed to work with the silo's acoustic properties, drawing the silo's own reverberation inside the inflatable. The funnel is paired with field recordings I captured at canal locks along the Erie Canal between Buffalo and Troy. Like the silo, the locks are infrastructure built to hold and release at will.

The work unfolds as an audiovisual essay. By layering, cutting, and repositioning sound with archival and newly recorded images, it moves through a series of tensions: the human body against the tempo of capitalist production; the vocabulary of "aliens" and "invasive species"; the idea of "home"; continuous re-beginnings; subjective pasts and multiple futures; resistance and flux; and lightning, both a materialization of attraction and repulsion and a charged exchange between ground and sky, between human and nonhuman.

Credits:

Withholding by Senem Pirler

Design and Fabrication of Inflatable Funnel: Senem Pirler and John Umphlett

Production Assistant: KS Brewer

Documentation: Mark Longolucco

Archival footage from and with thanks to the Prelinger Archive