Sirah Foighel

Brutmann &

Eitan Efrat

The audio-visual performance Measuring Narrative With Water uses language as a measuring tool: how closely does it approximate what we want to tell?

In the 1920s, Knud Heckscher, Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s great-grandfather, describes his experiences while traveling by water from Copenhagen to Bangkok and back. The succinct descriptions of his wanderings in Heckscher’s letters reveal the colonial white man’s fear of the unknown. At the same time, he feels threatened by an imported anti-Semitism. Foighel Brutmann performs excerpts from the letters in different languages, retellings, and accents.

With electronic effects and acoustic sounds, performed live by Eitan Efrat, the makers emphasize the physicality of the different languages used by Foighel Brutmann. On a screen we see text, projections of black-and-white photographs Heckscher took in Bangkok, and colorful video footage of watery phenomena. What fluids pass through us and affect us? To what extent are we responsible for the histories we inherit?

Measuring Narrative With Water touches on core themes in the practice of the artistic duo of Foighel Brutmann and Efrat. They are interested in the materiality, spatiality, and duration of images, the relationships between a viewer and history, and the temporality of narratives and memory.