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The word 'palaver' (from the Portuguese palavra, dialogue, talk, negotiation), today implies idle speech, nonsense, a fuss over nothing. Its roots are the Latin parabola, parable, speech, and the Greek parabole, juxtaposition. 'The Palaver' was originally a text made up of a single, unpunctuated sentence running headlong into a complex narrative, in which anecdotal, philosophical and psychological elements interweave. It evolved into a serial work in a collaboration with Andrew Bick, where the text was cut up into fifty blocks, each linked to a corresponding image detail, taken from larger photos and marked with a blue felt-tip pen. The text and image blocks were then printed on laminated cards, and exhibited in an installation as a kind of randomly determined 'storyboard.' Subsequently, 'The Palaver' appeared in a book version, in an audio version on CD, and finally as a video. 'Transcription' means, in this context, a 'writing over, writing across, re-writing.'
While the original text of 'The Palaver' deals with what Edmond JabĖs calls the 'impossibility of writing,' the video turns on the impossibility of touching, the essence of desire. A narrator invokes 'a voice in the shape of a window' while conferring that invocation upon a third person addressed as 'corse' (a corpse). The internal monologue of the presumed narrator is externalised in the corpse of a suicide victim, who addresses his own self in the past. The stories that emerge revolve around the narrator's sensual desires - to touch and to speak. Through a series of anecdotes we glimpse the life of a solitary figure, a writer, whose overwhelming desire -to see through a voice- remains unquenched, and for whom suicide is the window through which he observes that desire.
Gad Hollander
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Text, soundtrack, editing, production: Gad Hollander. Videoamera: Bob Goodliffe. Stills-photography: Andrew Bick (photos taken in various cities in Europe over the past five years). Super-8/bumpycam: Gad Hollander. Rostrum camera: Ken Morse. Voices: Jennifer Chalmers, Gad Hollander
Gad Hollander ° 1948 Jerusalem, Israel.
Lives and works in London, UK
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