language-landscape #2

Abstract

Can we see a translation? Does territory embody linguistic reality? These questions are central to language-landscape #2 (2025), a 9-minute video artwork that tries (and fails) to do something slightly absurd: to see translation, to locate where one language ends and another begins. Filmed across multilingual Belgian border regions: Mouscron, Sint-Genesius-Rode, Waterloo, Machelen, Visé, Bütgenbach, the video sets footage of rural landscapes against voices of translators and interpreters. These experts, working across literary, institutional, legal, and audiovisual contexts, give insight into their work and how they perceive it. Their speech is used as soundscapes that diverge rather than converge, complicating what translation does.

Borders appear as absences. A path through a village, a field without signs, a place where language is said to shift, but no trace tells us it has. Through disorienting camera angles, abrupt cuts, and the capture of seemingly insignificant moments, the work enacts the unstable labour of translation. Subtitles in different languages layer and overlap, unsettling reading habits, and geographic coordinates anchor each sequence to a precise location, even as the landscapes resist differentiation. The border is real, and it is also nowhere.