The Interpreter

The Interpreter investigates translation, the aesthetics of commemoration, and the role of cinema in shaping historical memory. The work examines Claude Lanzmann's seminal documentary Shoah (1985), not by revisiting its images, but by reconsidering how its testimonies are narrated, interpreted, and transmitted.

Professional sign-language interpreters perform voice-over texts derived from testimonies in Shoah. Rather than reproducing the original voices, the work reassigns these texts to historians and educational television directors, foregrounding the ways historical narratives are continually interpreted, mediated, and rearticulated. As the interpreters sign, their movements alternately synchronize and diverge, revealing the instability of translation and the mediated construction of historical memory.

Presented across three synchronized screens, the installation combines three distinct modes of representation. Two video channels draw on the conventions of familiar cinematic genres, meticulously recreating visual tropes that have shaped popular representations of the Holocaust. A third channel presents a continuously scrolling transcript of the spoken and signed text, exposing the slippages and negotiations between language, gesture, and image.