Language Barrier
2009
Digital two-channel video projection
Continuous loop, silent
Variable installation with height of projections 230 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP


The video shows the glass-encased entrance lobby of an International Style high-rise apartment in an affluent neighborhood of Buenos Aires – at nighttime. A recurring mechanism takes the viewer past the length of the lobby repeatedly, as the position of a doorman changes with each successive pass. Jacopo Crivelli Visconti writes: ”Each time the camera slides by, the doorman is in a different position: first he is sitting down, reading; then he is looking out of the building; a third time, he is standing up. In another shot the camera glides through the lobby and the doorman is nowhere to be seen: he may have gone or perhaps he has not arrived yet; there is no way of knowing, as the time of this video is not linear but confusing and enigmatic, like that of La Jalousie, the novel by Robbe- Grillet in which we also time and time again witness scenes that are the same yet not the same.”

Of the video’s title, Language Barrier, Crivelli Visconti continues. “In the first instance the reading would be obvious: as the artist herself says, ‘the glass boundary separates the lobby doorman and the pedestrian like a language barrier’; like a glass membrane which separates the doorman’s gaze from that of the artist who walks down the street (and from ours), the linguistic barrier is a fragile and almost invisible barrier, yet it separates two worlds, complicating the conversations of travellers and healthily confounding the certainties of those who stay behind. However, it may not be entirely wrong to think that language is, in itself and independently of the differences between languages, a barrier. Just like glass, language is a transparent barrier that, as it separates and protects, becomes more invisible the more we look at it. There is—as works such as Language Barrier prove so extraordinarily—a hidden poetry in the materiality of things...”


Texts 

Crivelli Visconti, Jacopo. The Transparency of Language.
link / pdf


Exhibition History

Language Barrier, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2009