Press release

Anri Sala
2 - 28 February
Musée Dauphinois

Born in Tirana in 1974. Lives and works in Paris.
“Over the years, a woman has accumulated and left behind her events, births, joys, misfortune, optimism, faith, fear, information, old newspapers, communism, disappointments, rebellions and, also, an interview, a silent interview – its sound had been lost – squeezed into two bits of film stock. The interview was made twenty years earlier, when this woman was one of the leaders of the Albanian Alliance of Young Communists. I forgot to say that this woman is my mother and that I found the interview in a box during a move. What was she saying twenty years ago? I started looking for witnesses to the interview so as to recover my mother’s words, but to no avail. The key was to read her lip movements. So I contact a school for the deaf and dumb. It felt strange, recapturing my mother’s voice in this silent school. Twenty years later, my mother was confronted with what she had said in that speech.”
(Anri Sala, text of the press release for the film).

Intervista, 1998, 26’
courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris