The work consists of images of my mother’s handwritten transcriptions of popular songs. She is a singer who, being non-English speaking, cannot understand the meaning of the original words and through this process of transcribing, the song’s lyrics become a new or imagined language.
A selection was made of the lyrics that refer to geographical locations The different places are only evoked through a bastardised English and as such only a stereotype remains; an unreachable reference point. The intimate translation that unintentionally results, creates a new landscape, the words becoming things or signs of a place that exists only in personal dreams.


View of the installation: To make words become things and not events, Bicycle, Giovanni Giaretta/Renato Leotta Effetto Majorana (La Solfatara, recording of disappearance, Function Creep, Amsterdam, NL
Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij