sj ramir 3
Our Voices Are Mute Figures 2008

SJ Ramir

31 May - 27 June 2010 in the Square² Gallery

Our Voices Are Mute  2008
DVD 4:3
Duration: 4:42 minutes, looped
Courtesy the artist and Orexart Gallery, Auckland

Our Voices Are Mute (2008) explores a real geographical setting as a territory of the mind. The landscape is hard to discern, yet gives a clear impression of being a desolate and inhospitable place, though which an assembly of anonymous figures toil. The figures progress in slow motion towards an unknown destination, occasionally intercepted by images – the silhouette of a building, poles or machinery – representing a dimly perceived external environment. The negotiation of these obstacles is a part of a journey which appears thankless, bleak and arduous.

The use of the personal possessive pronoun, ‘our’, in the work’s title suggests that the journey is one we all share, as a metaphysical state if not reality. An atmosphere of despair or psychic aloneness suggests the writing of playwright Samuel Beckett: the experience of total isolation underpins individual existence. While there are eight figures wandering in a broken line, they appear to provide little in the way of comfort or direction for each other. A soundtrack of wind provides a dirge-like score to the scene, invoking a gothic European landscape tradition, or perhaps just the very particular sinister blanket fogs and sweeping winds of the mid North Island region where much of Ramir’s work is filmed.    

Video artist SJ Ramir was born in New Zealand, and is now based in Melbourne. Much of his recent work considers the connection between the physical, external landscape and an internal or psychological landscape. This film was screened at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2009, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2009. Ramir’s work is distributed in Europe by Lightcone, and he is represented by Orexart Gallery in Auckland. See www.ramirfilms.co.nz

Image: SJ Ramir, still from Our Voices Are Mute, 2008. DVD. Courtesy the artist and Orexart Gallery, Auckland.