image from the 2008 installation of Chinese Whispers at Ellen deBruijne Projects in Amsterdam

became extremely interested in the work of Suchan Kinoshita again, well once over, not understanding the first time, as I realised in the search that we had seen her work before, at the skulptur projekte münster in 2007, when i got more interested to photograph the simple space than listen to the words… it was language that came between us (german) and with no translation in sight or sound, i used the set, or maybe it was weariness from the art-trekking… had not thought about it at the time, but the theatrical element was very strong —-the kind of box that you wanted to dance in—- and it turns out she has a background in experimental theatre as well… considerations for the direction of the audiences in space. She seems to like the between spaces. What about context as a between space, context surpassing even content? does language matter any more in a perforated box that you want to move in? And ashamed to admit it, but was looking for it in her cultural identity as well (half Dutch, half Japanese). Guilty of my own reductionist fears…

Today someone saw a copy of Wear and said, “Oh, it’s this kind of outsider’s perspective isn’t it?” And when his wife was flipping through it a while later and asked where I am from, she said “Oh, banana.”

Sigh, sigh sigh… I long for the Chinese whispers to happen a bit faster…

Between me and you is the “and” – it is spoken language that connects people to one other. And it is also words that separate them – if the “and,” for instance, were suddenly to disappear. “Chinese whispers,” known in German as “Stille Post” and in French as “téléphone arabe,” is a kindergarten game that illustrates our dependence on language more clearly than any linguistic theory. One person secretly whispers something into his neighbor’s ear, and he conveys what he has understood to the next person, and so on until – at the end of a long row of people – the last person hears something that, thanks to misunderstandings and misinterpretations, no longer resembles the original message. In her project for skulptur projekte münster 07, Suchan Kinoshita re-enacts this childhood game, selecting sentences from illustrated magazines or writings of various philosophers and language theorists as well as asking speakers commissioned by her to invent their own sentences. Other participants include so-called “disrupters,” who deliberately alter the phrases by translating them into other languages. With sensitive recording techniques, Kinoshita eavesdrops on these “Chinese whispers,” powerfully illustrating how the spoken word is subject to continuous change. In the Münster Chamber of Commerce, visitors can hear the resulting sound loop twenty-four hours a day without interruption. The large window in the showroom provides a full view of the street outside, which will almost automatically become the focus of the listener’s gaze. But standing in this open space, his ears entranced by “Chinese whispers,” he will have the chance to reflect on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s assertion that there is no escape from the circle drawn around us by our language.

–from the description of the project Chinese Whispers (Stille Post) [2007] available here, with Suchan Kinoshita’s interesting biography