Interviews from Miami: a dictionary, installation
Илияна Кънчева (Bulgaria)
During my residency in Miami I recorded four interviews with Venezuelan artists, living in there, in Spanish and English. They shared their personal feelings and stories about their art, about leaving Venezuela and coming to Miami.
From these interviews I selected keywords which appear in the recordings and, at the same time, are important for understanding the stories. I have ordered them alphabetically. Through automated software I extracted every phrase from the interviews in which a keyword is present, tearing it off from the context in which it was used. Thus restructuring, rearranging and fracturing their personal stories completely and emphasizing on the potential meanings in the individual phrases.
A dictionary serves to give definition to the words. In this work, I replace their meaning with a cloud of personal meanings and definitions extorted from the context. I use the formal organization of the dictionary to gather all the nuances appearing around each of these words.
Along with their stories I included mine about my own experiences in Miami, written in Bulgarian.
The stories are originally in three languages – English, Spanish and Bulgarian. All the translations between these languages are made again with Google translate, exposing its power and limitations.
The work consists of three separate elements – the art book, the audio of the original interviews and the video footage I have recorded during my stay, capturing the mood of the city and how I felt it.
