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Gilbert & Grape

”Hotdog is the only English word in her Vocabulary”
GilbertandGrape, 2005 6'

The video is based on the following exercise: Choose a photograph of a woman that has been accused of creating stereotypical attitudes about her culture and gender by the media. Based on the photograph improvise gestures and behaviour you think might have led to this. Create a scenography from whatever you have at hand, curtains, carpets etc. Choose a ”foreign” object-something, which has no relation to the photo, and place it in a central position. Ask someone with no filmatic experience to document you. Set the time frame to 6 minutes. After the exercise you take time out to evaluate this: Which of the gestures are genuine and which are acted out? When did you play a role and when did you not? How do you know the difference/differance?

THE VIDEO
Working from a visual recreation of found photographs, we create a method that exemplifies the use of translation. The way we think of translation is not so much a matter of unmasking, but rather of enriching text, language and thinking. A way to emancipate interpretations that are 'written' in the margin and between the lines. Our solemn play with fluid identities principally facilitates the exploration and potential in an in-between ness. The exercise you see in the video initiates a self-organizing 'architectural' activity that exposes pure play. We explore the taboo of play and its complications in regards to feminine history. “a space in which the speaking subject is free to move from one subject position to another. ( Toril Moi 1987)

GILBERTANDGRAPE
Anne-Marte Eidseth Rygh N) and Helen Pritchard (UK) is Norwegian/British duo GilbertandGrape. Established in 2003 the artists share a background in performance writing at Dartington College of Arts, UK. GilbertandGrape work within a genre they call performance journalism. By exploring subjects through a perspective of language they question how we read and write our stories. The way they gather material is similar to that of journalism, but differs in their attempt to gain independence from a commercial media with a prescribed political bias. Questioning the media’s dissemination of information and values.