Present by Way of Absence

While the first program of the evening, Pit of Babel, dealt with difference over time, the second program touched on sameness over time – so much so that the passing of time is difficult to measure. The Enduring began with Monique Moumblow’s Six Years in which a woman’s thoughts, articulated in Swedish, appear on screen in English subtitles. She describes bits and pieces of her relationship with her young daughter, her boyfriend, ex-boyfriends, and occasionally addresses an anonymous “you” – most notably at the end after she’s lamented the banality of her life we read “Everything that happened between us, happened when you weren’t here”. Moumblow’s piece points to how so much of our experience is determined not in the moment something occurs, but in the act of remembering it. In Six Years this seems to be rendered negatively, the woman’s life is primarily spent in a sparsely furnished home, quiet (she denies herself music as company, will only put it on if she intends to be an active listener) and alone despite the presence of others. She is perhaps too much in her memory. 

Althea Thauberger’s Chelsea Girls (which takes Andy Warhol’s 1966 film of the same name as a point of departure) was made as Thauberger lived in an apartment building in Victoria, B.C. for three months and collaborated with its residents, using them as actors and their stories as material. Not technically part of The Enduring program, Chelsea Girls countered the memory induced solitude felt in the earlier work by turning memory as an isolating, stagnating force, an anchor, into something that propels one forward.  

credit: Sarah Young

Althea Thauberger, Chelsea Girls