Nouvelle monographie, basée sur le film éponyme de Saskia Holmkvist, qui entremêle des mises en scène, des éléments documentaires et des images d'archives, explorant l'histoire récente de Belfast à travers une série de séquences aux tonalités diverses, tour à tour drôles, élégiaques et spéculatives.
Margaret (Back Translation) weaves together staged scenes, documentary elements and archival footage, exploring the recent history of Belfast through a series of tonally diverse scenes, by turns comic, elegiac and speculative. It involves a dialogue that speaks back to the evanescent nature of a past performance, acting as a filter through which to create new memories. The monograph acts in similar ways in connecting an idiosyncratic journey to a film.
Behind the title and film, Margaret (Back Translation), lies a performance event by artist Heather Allen who gave a spoken-word event performance in Belfast entitled KLub from 2001. Her performance commemorated Margaret Wright, whose brutal murder took place in a bar in 1994, the last (official) year of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Holmkvist's film undertakes to "back translate" Allen's performance, via Holmkvist's own experience of post-Troubles Northern Ireland from a distance and its contemporary artistic community. In the process, however, Margaret (Back Translation), explores how we can never simply return to, or recover, an "original" context. The film's real subject itself remains fugitive, always just out of shot. Instead the film constructs its narrative from absences, halting conversations, memories of secondhand experience, people who never quite appear from behind half-open doors. The film, Margaret (Back Translation), suggests how difficult it is to identify how, precisely, history informs our present – even when that history seems inescapable. The entire process becomes a quest for connection with a place marked by a tumultuous history.
Saskia Holmkvist (née en 1971) est une artiste basée à Stockholm. Elle est également enseignante et professeur de beaux-arts à l'académie des arts d'Oslo. Son travail s'attache à explorer les limites de la traduction en interrogeant la manière dont elle façonne les relations et les trajectoires historiques, à travers l'écoute critique, la spéculation orale, la répétition dans des œuvres performatives et des installations cinématographiques.
Edité par Corina Oprea.
Contributions de Sara Eliassen, Sue-Ann Harding, Temi Odumosu, Manuel Pelmus, Saskia Holmkvist,
Jan Verwoert.
Conception graphique : Jonas Williamson.
2025 (parution prévue au 4e trimestre)
édition anglaise
à paraître
