NYAB Event - Gerhard Friedl and Laura Horelli "Shedding Details"

Gerhard Friedl and Laura Horelli "Shedding Details"

Ludlow 38 / The Goethe-Institut New York

This event has ended.

MINI/Goethe-Institut Curatorial Residencies Ludlow 38 announces the screening of Shedding Details (2009), a video by Gerhard Friedl and Laura Horelli. In 2009 the artists conducted research on Culinary Union Local 226 in Las Vegas. In the process, they met Slavica Tricolic, who had just been fired after ten years of working as a maid at Caesars Palace. The video shows her recounting with grief and despair the occurrences that led to her dismissal, and provides insight into the hotel’s strict employee policies. But Shedding Details extends beyond the working conditions at Caesers Palace and the unfortunate story of its protagonist. Since Tricolic spoke little English, during the interviews her son-in-law Dejan Zoric translated her story. It was only during the postproduction in Berlin, when Tricolic’s words were translated from Serbo-Croatian to English for the second time, that the artists noticed the discrepancies between Zoric’s translation and Tricolic’s original words. In the gap between her words and his version, two stories were told. The subtitled video reveals the struggle and overlapping of these twin perspectives, documenting a space of interaction, an onscreen drama, which was not controlled by the artists. Shedding Details is a film about the verbal depiction of labor and the conditions of its production, and a necessary account in a moment of economic crisis. It is a film about the conditions, problems, and aporias of documentary practices, and the influence of translation on narratives.