Approach

The text used in the video installation APPROACH is from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, written in Italy for almost 700 years ago. Dante’s poem is concerned with man’s search for meaning and not least for the inexplicable or intangible.

On entering the installation APPROACH you hear voices reciting the first 14 verses of “Paradiso”, and you meet the visual side, in which a number of persons recite the same verses, but in sign language.
The 14 verses contain Dante’s deeply felt prayer to Apollo to give the poet the strength to hold onto just a little part of what he has seen on his journey.
The soundtrack and the visuals thus tell the same story, but in different languages. Caught between these two languages, the visitor to the installation is sharply confronted with the fundamental situation of our relation to the surrounding world, the constant necessity of interpretation. The ideal of unambiguous communication does not exist. We are
always in a field of interpretation, and even though we speak the same language, it is not given that we understand the same thing.