How is it that the right words in the right order can become something luminous, a moment of clarity, something that you can’t stop thinking about? Some reading experiences are like this: you become completely enthralled by a paragraph or a sentence in a novel and you wish you had written the thing yourself.

How is it that a character in a film is really only a succession of images on a screen? And only the ‘necessary’ images in the ‘necessary’ order. Our desire slips in the gaps and fills out this character, or we might pick up our phone and fill in the gaps with more images – of the actor who is playing the character and of who they’re romantically involved with, what they looked like 10 years ago, what they wore to a prestigious event in 2024.

What kind of coherence do we make of all this text and image and what does it say about our desire? In Text and Image, Nicola offers her own fantasy life as a place to start thinking together from. The work moves between philosophical questions about translation and a deeper search to put into words and pictures a feeling that seems impossible to articulate: an attempt to translate desire and to put an identity in translation.


ARTIST STATEMENT:

This project continues my research into the dramaturgy of translation and the act of interpretation, beginning with The Interpreters (2022), as well as my friendship with real-life French translator, Séverine Magois. In Text and Image, I am attempting to fill in the gaps created by The Interpreters and make sense of an artistic process that involves continually re-writing, and of making versions, iterations and permutations of a work until I feel I have found ‘the right words in the right order’.

Perhaps in this body of work, too, I am interested in complicating the role of writer, translator, performer and character, and of reversing the order, jumbling up normal timelines: Is it possible to make a translation of something that has not yet been written? Can I then work backwards from a translation in order to create the original? Will the character reveal the actor, instead of disguising her?

I am attempting to make sense of the years of material I have gathered in thinking about this project and how can the work of composition and editing continually create new narratives, new relationships, new meaning over time.

And so playing with time will be a key compositional tool in this piece: ideas around falling in and out of time, being in-sync and out-of-sync, looping, collaging, re-mediating, closing and opening the gap between things, live and pre-recorded.

Written and Performed by NICOLA GUNN
Sound Design and Composition MATHIAS GRØNSDAL and DUANE MORRISON
Lighting Design MAJA BERGEBAKKEN SUNDT
Scenography KATIE ÅTLAND
Photography SARA STIANSEN

CO-PRODUCED by ROSENDAL TEATER and BIT TEATERGARASJEN.
FUNDED by NORSK KULTURRÅDET, FOND FOR LYD OG BILDE and BERGEN KOMMUNE.
RESIDENCIES with BERGEN KUNSTHALL LIVE STUDIO, THEATRE SILVIA MONFORT, KMD and BERGEN DANSESENTER.