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My Name is Scot
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My Name is Scot
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My Name is Scot
Petko Kamehov
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My Name is Scot
Margarita Hlebarowa
Our exhibition Public Address opened tonight and, according to the participating Bulgarian artists, it was a success; many “important people” were there, though being outsiders we couldn’t really determine who was who. The show was part performance, part video and part book exhibition, and it included our work as well as the works of Bulgarian and international artists.
Public Address was a dialogue between a riot police officer and a protestor, which we had translated into Bulgarian, performed by two Bulgarian actors. We also displayed a “book,” a bilingual poster folded in half like a newspaper. The poster included fragments of our English performance dialogue alongside translated snippets of the text in Bulgarian.
It is a gratifying experience to watch somebody else perform your texts, perhaps even more so when they do it in another language. While we imagined that we could follow the pacing of their voices to figure out where the actors were in the script, we couldn’t be sure at all how the content was being interpreted. Actors, of course, use far more than just language to put ideas across. The actor who performed my text appeared to be very emphatic, almost angry at times, whereas I always imagine my dialogue as poetic and dreamy. Scot’s performer was less cryptic and more scholarly in his interpretation of his text. Perhaps they saw things in our texts we couldn’t see? Very interesting indeed.
I imagine I shouldn’t confess to this but when you make art there is a moment when you stand back and wonder: does this make any sense? You begin to fear that people will stand in front of your work and wonder what the hell you were thinking. But tonight, despite the uncertainties of language and differing cultural expectations, it all felt like it worked.