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OANA PAULA VAINER
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Fate be changed look inside
Video
The riddle chosen as a title, a spell, is an attempt to classify the subjectivity of what the video imagines to be as fear and anxiety: „Fate be changed, look inside. Mend the bond, torn by pride “. Here we have a flame-haired heroine, in the middle of two transformation processes, one of hereditary issue being the next in line to throne, and the other is of her mother and queen becoming by mistake a bear. „Dear and bonny and lovable, the face beautiful, and transfigured with the light of that lustrous intellect and the fires of that unquenchable spirit “. This are the words of Mark Twain imagining Joan of Arc and at the same time it could be the portrait of the new warrior princess riding, fighting, shooting, and hating plaiting their hair, never waiting for the prince to come and rescue her. The girl rises against getting married and get in touch with a witch, nowhere else than in the deep woods guided by some small magic flames. After she receives the spell in form of a cake, the witch leaves her a riddle, which contains the way of reverting it. In the video, the communication between the mother and the daughter is done simultaneously in two different languages, suggesting a familiar bilingual constellation of the appropriated foreign culture. Nevertheless, the spoken language, here French versus Romanian, doesn’t seem a matter of crossed wires, what forms a point of controversy is the traditional thinking around identity, Merida rebels against stepping into the expected role. Once the familiar setting is being constructed and introduced, an uncanny representation pops up out of the mother’s character, who stays for the narrative midpoint, and imagine the significant for fear and anxiety. The mother takes the shape of a brown bear. Beginning with this moment the subject loses its capacity to communicate and end up by being hunted as a wild animal. The roles are switched. As a reminder of its former visual self, now the self is digitally dispersed, brutally displaced. The video uses material recorded in front of the TV device, from the consumer point of view. Not belonging to the upper-class society of representations, while the present shooted image hierarchy includes sharpness as well as resolution (4K). In an effort to edit a message to the future, the recorded samples from the original movie are being transformed, displaced and dislocate, at the expense of its own substance. The languages are chosen from a wide range of translated synchronizations. During this process the words that do not match phonetically are modified to the screen actors lip movements and are adjusted to the length of each sentence so that it coincides with it. Translation transforms the original words, in the same time disappearance relates to a new resulting form. Through the impossibility to understand the whole dialogue, what was taken from the pop culture is transformed in something quite obscure and difficult to decipher. What one is expected to see and hear takes the shape of potential exclusion. Fear occurs in the direct representation of a bear, magical, bewitched mother, transformed in a most uncanny shape, half human, half animal, in danger of being trapped into the liminal space of the spell. Within the limits of a group of people, of houses or a closed community, there is a necessity in seeking for a wider models or types of ways of living with other, confronting the unknown in a constructive form. Nowadays, the contemporary society gather manifold micro-constructions that mirrors one of many existing models of living coexistences. The language is also a construct to use and communicate with each other, a tool that bound or torn apart. What happens if the one whom I’m spoken to understand the language but can’t answer in the same order? How this can be bond to the present in a different cultural system?
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