LEARNING TO TRANSLATE LITHUANIAN. A PERFORMANCE. Bram Thomas Arnold The Gallery, Dartington College Of Art
I went for a walk from my front door to the edge of Dartmoor. I took some photographs along the way I got home, sat down and started to write, rewalking the path in my mind. Out of the still images I constructed a film. Out of the scribbles I constructed a text that I invited others to edit. Out of the edits I created a distorting narrative, which became part of the film. At every subsequent showing I offer my text for editing by the viewer, with the promise to add their edit to the film in its next incarnation. With the 2nd Alytus Biennial in Lithuania in 2007 I saw the opportunity to work with translation to further destabilise the narrative of the document of this seemingly inconsequential walk. I worked with the Lithuanian translator Gintautas Kaminskas, based in Canada to develop a
Lithuanian version of my text for ‘Door To Moor: Lithuanian Edition’. When the film was shown in Alytus copies of the text were made available in both Lithuanian and English for viewers to edit, therefore participating
The sparse grammar of Lithuanian, the inadequacies of my small dictionary, and my complete lack of knowledge of the language, combined with my acute familiarity with the original text in English produce a series of distortion poems from the edits.