CatharineClarkGallery

Nina Katchadourian

Artist’s statement, Return Trip (1991/1993/2013)

While I was a graduate student at UC San Diego in the early 1990s, I began working with my family’s collection of 8mm and Super 8 home movies. Some of the footage was shot by my own parents and some of it by other family members, mostly in Finland and in Lebanon. Most of the footage had no soundtrack. I shot additional Super 8 footage, adding it to the older material and making new films, and also added sound from a variety of sources: language learning cassette tapes, fables and family stories recounted by my relatives, songs my brother and I improvised and recorded together as children, and interviews that I conducted with my parents. This yielded a collection of very short videos, ranging from under a minute to a few minutes long, which became the piece 30 Years 21 Minutes 17 Tapes. When shown originally, each video was on a separate VHS video tape with a title on the spine. There was no prescribed sequence for viewing the tapes: a viewer could select a title, view the video, and then chose another. In this way, each viewer had an experience of the material that built a loose story out of fragments in a different order. 

I revisited this piece when invited to exhibit at testsite in Austin, TX, in 2013. For this show, I decided to sequence the works into one continuous piece and to call it Return Trip. Undergirding this collection are the voices and images of women who have been central to my family and to the preservation of these stories.