Whose Language You Don’t Understand

video, 2018, 62 minutes.

After discovering The Weight of Things on the new releases shelf of the library, I became interested in the writer Marianne Fritz (1948-2007), despite most of her work remaining untranslated. Fritz spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of dense and complex novels she called “The Fortress”, consisting of over 10,000 pages -- and still unfinished at the time of her death. Her project is an unusual and astonishing one that challenges the conventions of writing and reading. Whose Language You Don’t Understand, named after Fritz’s novel of the same name, was made out of a period of research and visits to her apartment and archive. The work follows a trajectory of ideas that surround her work and is a cycle of twelve video sections, one for each of the volumes of Fritz’s book. I could not read Fritz’s words directly, but each section is an attempt to engage with her work by building a network around it. These sections are told from the perspective of each member of a team working on a dense, difficult and mysterious project. Each section confronts the philosophical and practical limitations involved in telling a history and explores the limits of language. The project shares a process that is parallel to Fritz’s where writing sustains a reality. Writing, and here, image making, become a movements into an alternative world whose readership/viewership offers radical possibilities.

The research for this project was done in 2017 on a residence from KulturKontakt supported by The Austrian Federal Chancellery.