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A scenario
for perfect placement: A Spanish Cooking Lesson Do you have anything to declare? What is your room number? Bring the gun here together with the six-chambered revolver. Wait a moment, there is a mosquito on your ear. Is it possible to snow board on this slope? I never carve the chicken in the kitchen. Would you like a cigarette. You are my fleshy thing. Can you speak English? The cleverness of Europeans is great indeed. Your great new country. Are many apples eaten here? Bring a broom and sweep out this filth. > about
about Four concurrent recordings loop throughout the gallery :: a composition of phrases drawn from old travel language books, layered and juxtaposed to create a quirky word play.
catalogue text - by Ben.Harper
The foreward to a 1943 edition of a Japanese phrasebook explains that due to political circumstances it contains certain phrases for the traveller that are not found in previous editions, such as "One false move and you're a dead man." A Malay phrasebook from the 1940s describes itself as "intended principally for English pepole who propose to reside in Malaya"; it consists almost solely of orders, such as one would give to servants. For some time Helen Gibbins has collected language books, intrigued by the one-sided conversations they conduct with foreigners as we have variously imagined them. In "A Spanish Cooking Lesson" she presents these conversations, off the page and repatriated to her native English, as voices rehearsing the distinct personae these books frequently suggest: officious, suspicious, deferent, whingeing, randy. Like the peculiar illustrations such books frequently contain, a world is presented upside-down to our own, cartoonish, out of kilter, where depicted reality is excessively simplistic and placed at the service of representation, as if the world exists to make a point about the language that describes it. |
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| © helen gibbins |