7th Havana Biennial -  Home November 2000 - January 2001Home
Dhara Rivera - Statement
The text has been sent to us by the artist.
Oral communication needed a receptive ear to complete one of its many functions, creating and recreating social bonds, it was not interested in truth as we know it. Does the ear exist that plays the part to these "anachronic" way of transmitting information? What happens with the transmitters? Are they floating into space like balloons let loose of their ties?

The voice that can barely be heard in the installation comes from an old family recording. A woman is talking about her recollections of the narration that her own mother use to make to her as a child. At the moment of the recording she was telling it to her own daughter, my mother. The story revolves around a big natural disaster that uprooted the family from their land and the survival and transformations that followed.

I am not interested in the "facts" that this story reveals, not the specifics of the biographical data. I am more interested in the kind of "storytelling" that this material represents, the space it occupies or the vacuum to which it has been assigned.

This piece looks at the gaps, it points at a posssible restoration of the communication chain and questions the possibility of video images as the modern surrogate of storytelling. The image of the large screen is a mouth that speaks in silent, the cityscape is behind, entwined. The lips move but they are not really synchronized with the narration. Are they also speaking to the emptiness in space or are they letting the voice of the narration speak through them?

© Text: Dhara Rivera
Photo: Gerhard Haupt & Pat Binder,
Universes in Universe
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