The Interpreter, 2013
Multi-channel video installation, 26 min.
(5 minute excerpt)
(5 minute excerpt)
The Interpreter investigates the act of translation, the aesthetics of commemoration and the role of cinema in the construction and preservation of historical memory. To do so The Interpreterexamines Claude Lanzmann’s seminal documentary film Shoah (1985). In The Interpreterprofessional sign-language sign “voice-over” texts derived from testimonies captured in Lanzman’s film. The voices of the original witnesses are replaced with those of historians and educational-television directors. educational-television directors. As the interpreters sign their movements sync and diverge, emphasizing the constructed and evasive nature of historization.
The work is presented on three screens. Two video channels follows different conventions of easily recognizable cinematic genres that painstakingly recreate cinematic clichés which have shaped and established a popular image of the holocaust. A third channel presents the a scrolling textual transcript of the texts spoken and signed.
