The recording of a literary interpretation of a performance by the artist Pablo Pijnappel.
The record is a spoken-word, audio rendering of two accounts included in the publication
Beyond Imagination/Zona de Crepúsculo—itself a literary interpretation of a performance of the same title presented in the Pijnappel's solo exhibition at the Iberê Camargo Foundation, Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2018.
Manipulating the notions of translation, interpretation and memory, the two texts are interwoven into a bilingual (English and Portuguese), forked narrative. The record comes with a printed translation of the accounts into its opposite language (e.g. spoken English is written in Portuguese and vice-versa).
The work of Pablo Pijnappel (born 1979 in Paris, lives and works in
Amsterdam) is foremost highly constructed. He builds
narrations
based on anecdotes and everyday events, perhaps souvenirs, family legends
or plain fictions. With psychoanalysis and
literature
as his usual starting points, Pablo Pijnappel's works are meta-narratives
that poetically combine cultural, historical and ancestral
identities
through the prism of memory.
Language
always plays a leading role in uniting mental mechanisms and the world, in
video installations, texts, or
performances
that lie at the crossroads between
cinema,
photography, and fragments of prose. The non-linear use of different
archives
and film extracts highlights this uncertainty and contributes to the loss
of these stories over time. The works only offer pauses and silent
moments, allowing the investment of our imagination. The "life
stories" told by Pablo Pijnappel are often those of his family
who travelled a lot and had to adapt to new countries and their cultures.
Through his tales, we visit Brazil in the 1940s, Japan, the United Kingdom and also Germany.
