Gerda Lampalzer
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TRANSLATION
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With the video installation TRANSLATION, the artist pursues the idea that another language is concealed within each language. Four people were filmed speaking their various mother-tongues. The passages have been dismantled into their smallest units and re-edited to create a German text with a completely new meaning.
The project TRANSLATION was dismantled in 2018 and included in the Landessammlungen Niederösterreich.
The project TRANSLATION is based on the idea that every language has a different language concealed within it. This is a poetic, theoretical linguistic, musical and media theoretical idea, but also the product of personal experience. Who doesn't know the phenomenon when you suddenly think you can hear snippets in your own language in a foreign one, or have heard something that was not said at all? In the project TRANSLATION four people were recorded on video speaking in their own mother tongues (Russian, Japanese, Spanish, English), the passages were dissected into small units and re-edited as a German text. The synchronised video image was also distorted by a (speech) rhythm. The new texts are not standard translations but a distillation of syllables and vowel sounds that were montaged to provide texts with a completely new meaning. The entirely artificial speech of the protagonists has been choreographed as a four-channel multimedia installation where, on four screens, they speak sometimes solo, sometimes with one another and sometimes in chorus to create a piece in German with four different accents. The rhythm follows semantic rather than musical laws, producing a surreal poetry in which the Utopian moment of the procedure lies: the play on a universal language with the relativisation of talking with meaning. With Sergey Panteleev, Rie Takahashi, Jorge Daniel Valencia, Kim Hogben.
(Gerda Lampalzer)
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