Reassemblage Trinh T. Minh-ha , 1982 Combining a postcolonial approach with a cinematic reflection on the narrative positions of culturally-embedded subjects, Min-ha's "Reassemblage" had a huge impact on experimental ethnography in the early 1980s. Women are the focus but not the object of this influential film, a complex visual study of rural Senegal. The film is a montage of fleeting images and includes almost no narration, as Min-ha intended "not to speak about/Just speak near by," decentring her own position as speaking subject in relation to the images presented to the viewers. "Reassemblage" reflects on documentary filmmaking itself and the ethnographic representation of cultures. Min-ha’s method emerges through disjunctive editing, distilling sounds, silences, repetitions, vistas of Senegalese villagers and their surroundings, and abrupt jumps-cuts from wide shots to extreme close-ups, in order to reveal the cultural functions of cinematic discourses.
The Politics of Translation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, en: Outside in the teaching ma, New York: Routledge, 1993
CONTEMPORARY ART PROJECTS
Reading Seminars. Rainer Ganahl (Austria, 1961) , Organizing group readings and discussions is an integral part of Ganahl’s art practice, which involves a series of ongoing projects with different books, chosen for specific contexts. Texts by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg or contemporary authors may provide the basis for shared reflections on translation and cross-cultural exchange. The books, the places, the people change but the method is always the same: communal readings and discussions.
On Translation: Miedo/Jauf. Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona 1942), 2007, Part of the On Translation project, initiated in 1995, which comprises more than thirty works. Miedo/Jauf explores the complex transcodings of fear on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar. Through interviews, context and archive footage, quotes, press headlines and excerpts form films, Muntadas “creates a metaphor of situations in which translation, interpretation, what is left unsaid and silence all form a part of the narrative.”
