'Your children are not your children. [...} You can house their bodies, but not their souls, for their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, which you cannot visit...' These lines by Kahlil Gibran could have been the motto for the video, which was recorded in the Aragon region in northern Spain. Of the desolate village of Berdun we see only details: a door half-rotted away, a rusty letterbox, a gate overrun with weeds. This is how the stranger sees Berdun. But the village children give their own voice to all these things. They name their world in broken English, the language of the tourist, and in Spanish, their native tongue. Their voices come out of the wall and resound in the space behind a weather-beaten door. The sound gradually becomes evermore distorted in a way typical for Sercombe, by slowdowns and echoes until a strange rhythm is formed.
The village gets a heartbeat. It is as though the children talk in ritual formulas in an incomprehensible language. Their eyes look at us from another world, one we can never enter. They are rooted to the village, but already live in the future. This first part is much more an independent whole than are the second and third parts, for which Sinead Jones made the soundtrack. The collaboration between Sercombe and Jones has given us several impressive performances such as 'Maud' (2000) and 'Tongues Undone' (1998, with Chris Cheek); parts two and three of 'La Lección Inglesa' can also be shown as part of a performance. The soundtrack with Jones' characteristic voice supports the images of the rough northern-Spanish mountain landscape and of the dilapidated train station with its discarded carriages. She varies from a wordless lament that can be taken for the traditional song of a forgotten mountain people to a cheerful, supposedly authentic little piece of music that you associate with a travel agency commercial.
– Lies Holtrop
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Sound Peter Lely, voice Sinead Jones
Martin Sercombe ° 1953 Exeter, UK
Lives and works in Norwich, UK
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