Pendulum
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
15:44 minutes
Maya Watanabe
Three men with their backs to each other, dressed similarly in dark colors, stare straight at the camera. They individually deliver sacred lines from the Torah, New Testament, and Qur’an in their representative languages: Old Hebrew, Greek, and Old Arabic. As the camera slowly rotates around the trio, the men begin to perform traditional manifestations of each religious cult: Torah Cantillations, Gregorian Chants, and tilawat of Al-Qur’an. The chanting is interspersed with subtitled translations that reveal similarities and connections between each text—names, locations, and subjects are repeated—complicating the relationship between them. It is unclear which voice is which, and what story they are trying to tell. Much like the amalgamation of voices and meanings in Maya Watanabe’s Pendulum , Peru’s religion is a blended mix of beliefs representative of the country’s history. The predominant religion in the country is Roman Catholic, something that the Spanish conquerors of Peru sought. Many churches were built during this period and convents were also built on ancient Inca sites. Yet indigenous religions and practices persisted and fused with Catholicism resulting in a hybrid of spirituality and religion. Watanabe’s video, El Contorno (2011), which is part of the KADIST collection, operates on a similar level to Pendulum . Both consider language and identity which both become fluid and unfixed as the characters strive to dissolve their unique subjectivities.
Drawing on her background in theater design and direction, Maya Watanabe is known for her multi-channel video installations that explore the relationship between language, collectivity, identity, and space. Considering words, silences and the interweaving of the two, her videos are often slow, controlled, and cyclical in nature. Earlier works incorporate references and methodologies from cinematographic language, often involving one or several actors performing a script and interacting with the camera through choreographed movements. The texts narrated by the actors are either borrowed quotes from movies or modified poems and scripts, which become untethered when taken out of their original context. The ambiguity and lack of narrative that results reveals the imprecise nature of perception and the images and memories that we rely to construct identity. Recent works examine the landscape, exploring their tendency towards the fantastical and ability to conjure memories. With particular attention to the legacy and history of Peru, her work considers the fragmented, uprooted, and mutable past of a place, and how issues of historical instability can take centuries to resolve.
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Maya Watanabe
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