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Empire Line. Fluid Space. Video Installations. Antonia Hirsch

Sharla Sava

“Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence, something inessential.”
—Walter Benjamin “The Task of the Translator”

In her audio-visual installation, Fluid Space, Antonia Hirsch has created an environment in which the viewer is invited to consider the act of translation. Spoken language, as a fundamental component of human communication, is taken as the site of this process. Translation, as a mode, is explicitly enacted in the audio component of the work, where a female voice, moving between German and English, is heard saying the word ‘translate.’ During successive phases the same voice travels through the soundscape to pronounce the range of associative terms which each stage of translation between the two languages inspires. Hirsch’s translating process generates a potentially infinite associative train: translate — übersetzen—transmit — cross — senden — kreuzen — transpose — extend — versetzen — übertragen and so on.

Because the visual aspect of Fluid Space focusses entirely on projected images of water, the installation elicits a more elaborate consideration of the concept of translation than one defined strictly in terms of human language difference. It invites us to see that translation also describes the way in which nature may be taken into culture, or living experience taken into art. This positions the meaning of the work beyond the locale of mere linguistic difficulties, as it implies that all of human social life is touched by the act of translation. The environment of Fluid Space as a whole, which is at certain moments dynamic in its generative potential while at other moments disturbingly chaotic, does not offer a definitive statement about the effects of translation so much as to embody it as a condition.

Given that the audio component of Fluid Space emphasizes translation in language while the visuals invoke a journey taken by boat the art invites an interpretation of these parallel experiences as a form of allegory. The work is densely layered with cues that assist us in this pursuit. To depart from one’s mother tongue into a new language—to move, for instance, from German into English in the way that the artist herself has done in recent years - is to embark on a journey which severs the act of everyday speech from its familiar, and usually assumed, attachment to personal and historical identity. This transit between languages, because it untethers the component parts of signification and constantly insists on new pairings between the idea of a thing, the thing itself and its totality as sign, is likened to leaving the certainty of the world to enter the fluid unfamiliarity of water. Water removes what is comfortable and recognizable about moving on the surface of the land: the ability to perceive discrete objects and their orientation in space, which is to say, the means by which navigation is made possible. The success of the installation rests on an implicit belief that representations of the visual and material world are capable of displaying—one might say translating—a condition which unfolds as a conflict within the existence of a subject who is attempting to speak. In this way Fluid Space suggests an affinity with the work of Mona Hatoum or Gary Hill.

The given structure of an audio-visual installation necessitates the provision of a soundtrack which can repeat indefinitely during viewing hours, and Hirsch has constructively manipulated this condition to suit the demands of her subject. In a perpetual loop which runs from start to finish every twelve minutes, the audio environment of Fluid Space travels from comprehensible words to a crescendo of sheer cacaphony, positing the act of translation as one which moves from a suggestive viability into a sphere of apparent failure. As the atmospheric noise mounts, the formal qualities of sound displace the linguistic conventions of human communication. This willingness to take everyday sounds such as the breath or voice as the basis of a repeating rhythmic structure rather than making an acoustic space which relies on personal narration or harmonic musical composition recalls the minimalist aesthetics of John Cage or Steve Reich. The tendency of this experimental mode may be the painful suspension of meaning which results from the loss of accepted conventions of communication. That is, Hirsch’s strategy runs the risk of depoliticizing the language and diminishing its potential as a viable instrument of communication. In this environment the residue of historical trauma which expresses itself through language has no direct means of being spoken or heard.

In her concurrent installation Empire Line Hirsch chooses to take up a more overtly political subject through her evocation of the historical condition of empire. The title is important here, as it leads the viewer into a careful consideration of the dress, which is the central agent of the work. Fashion, inevitably constituted by ideology, in this instance recalls the style of the high waist or ‘empire line’ worn by women during the period of 19th century European empires. The material of the dress, which is made of tea, perpetuates this historical frame of reference, recalling in particular the period of British colonization of South East Asia and the advance of the tea trade which resulted from it. In two direct ways, then, the viewer is required to contemplate the socio-political reality of historical empires.

Empire Line may find another site of interpretation through social theories which examine the contemporary inequities perpetuated through the dynamics of globalization. This reading is invited through the strategic inconsistencies in Hirsch’s narrative of empire. One instance of this is the dress which is used in the installation, which, signifying empire, does not feign an origin in an earlier era. The image projected is a dress made of teabags, which are a familiar contemporary commodity produced through mechanical processes and prefabricated materials. The troubled world of which Empire Line speaks might now be seen as the present. The transformation of the social world from the power relations of empire and colony to those of globalization is not more more humane or equitable. As Arjun Appadurai’s theorization of global cultural flows indicates, it is merely a more disjunctive and confounding one. If it is seen as a contemporary articulation, Empire Line participates in a social world where the circulation of power has lost the claims of empire and is now enacted through contradictory and competitive dynamic forces which include global human migration, technological expansion, transnational capital, and the vast imaginary of the mediascape. In its materials, fabrication and the very imagination through which it came into existence, the dress partakes of such disjunctive flows. Its social and political constitution is historical through inference and contemporary through presence.

The conditions of modernity which determine our subjective and social lives are no less insistent in the aesthetic realm. With this in mind, I would like to return to one aspect of the earlier discussion of Fluid Space. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on translation may be of assistance in interpreting what at first seems a nihilistic interpretive turn. Benjamin’s own interest in language was marked by a resistance toward having it serve explicit political interests. He wanted language to have a noninstrumental role, which through its style and usage, would nevertheless retain its political relevance. Benjamin supposed that the difficult process of translation was potentially revelatory in that it held the potential of showing that neither the original nor the translation were in themselves ever complete. Rather, they were like parts of a broken vessel whose entirety was inaccessible within the troubled confines of human language, in all of its plural manifestations. It is possible in this light then, to suppose that Hirsch’s decision to construct an environment of translation which at moments concedes to its own failure may, finally, be the only success of which any of us are capable.