[no translation available]
Saudade (performance + videos), May 2018
Saudade (book), May 2018, 8.5 in W x 5.5 in H
During an artist residency at I:O, Helikon Art Center's Art Residence for international artists, Friedman created the group performance and research collaboration, [no translation available]. The piece explored the roles of communication and interpretation in relationships of care. A plant in an immersive event included a discussion amongst attendees of the exhibition opening at Kedi Gallery in Izmit, Turkey. After hearning a text selected and read by performer and poetic translator, Cyriaco Lopes and sung by Mercedes Aqui, audience members reflected on the variation in meaning.
Saudade (video still), May 2018[no translation available] began with interview-based research and included a collaborative event with fellow artists-in-residence. Vocals by Mercedes Aqui, poetry reading by Cyriaco Lopes, Thai-to-English translation research with Sikarnt Skoolisariyaporn and live English-to-Turkish translation by Alp Aslan.
The piece exposed viewers to three separate deliveries of the same text, “Estranha Forma de Vida,” a song originally sung in Portuguese by Amália Rodrigues, and delivered in this piece via an oral reading, a cappella vocals and a book Friedman wrote with text, video screenshots and Google Translate.
Friedman led a viewer discussion after the event to explore human experience and expression as translation accelerators.
The piece exposed viewers to three separate deliveries of the same text, “Estranha Forma de Vida,” a song originally sung in Portuguese by Amália Rodrigues, and delivered in this piece via an oral reading, a cappella vocals and a book Friedman wrote with text, video screenshots and Google Translate.
Friedman led a viewer discussion after the event to explore human experience and expression as translation accelerators.
The book is jumbled and out of order, requiring further translation behind the rules of language. The song includes one of six untranslatable Portuguese terms, Saudade. The word means a type of nostalgia for something that has never happened. Lopes, a translator of Portuguese poetry and literature, explains that the word is “just like joy, but the opposite.”
One text, two voices, many assumptions.
Although the poet in the performance read the same text that the vocalist was singing, viewers responded that they believed that two different texts were being delivered.
One text, two voices, many assumptions.
Although the poet in the performance read the same text that the vocalist was singing, viewers responded that they believed that two different texts were being delivered.
Saudade (book page), May 2018