6 min digital HD video, video stills
Displayed on a 47 inch monitor set into 118 x 210 cm painted plane in the installation The Stable Language
Kairos Time, TENT, Rotterdam, 2014

First Contact

A still life setting with consumer products by iconic Dutch brands is framed by an overhead camera in a pseudo-scientific view. Two partially obscured figures enter and conduct an improvised performance with supermarket collector cards that they appropriate for language learning; animal names become abstracted in the material sounds of speech and associative connections create an interplay between the Dutch and English languages. The construction of the scene is then revealed in a deconstructive turn as off-camera activity is included in the margins of the frame.

This work attempts to reproduce some of the experiential qualities of the artists first impressions of the Netherlands on arrival into Rotterdam from New Zealand such as the unfamiliar sounds of the language and the confusion of encountering things that were "both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time." The Netherlands' long history of trading is also a theme embedded in the work, present in the initial still life setting of the branded products and implicit in the activity of exchange. The low-key style of performance for the camera extends an interest in documenting the everyday performances through which we enact ourselves in our daily lives.

Key words: Albert Heijn supermarket, Hema department store, Van Nelle Tobacco, non-acting as performance, language as sounds, associative, still life, scientific rationality and objective observational view.