Lamento Redux by Nevin Aladag

Following her widely received video work Family Tezcan (2001) and the photo series Freeze (2003) and Jump (2004), Nevin Aladag again turns her attention to Turkish-born youth in Germany, in an effort to retrace the
meandering process of acculturation today. Whereas in the aforementioned works, the neo-universal languages of breakdance and hip hop provided Aladag's protagonists with a somewhat neutral playground from where they articulated their struggle for a new identity, Voice Over appears to turn the tables around.

The recently completed film unfolds in three distinct parts, a sort of prologue, followed by two alternating, equally weighted sequences. The thirteen-minute video starts with a car ride through a social housing district: an anonymous hand sticks a harmonica out of the car, as we hear the soft whistle of the wind blowing through the instrument. Cut to a riverbank: rain is pouring down on a seemingly abandoned drum kit. Follows a night shot in a park: adolescent Turks sing folk ballads in the shady light of the camera lamp.

The voice-over is a cinematographic device essentially made popular by film noir. In many instances it is used to convey a contradiction between image and sound. Aladag‚s video does not strictly speaking use an off-voice. Yet the teenagers‚ singing reveals a shift, itself pointing to a significance beyond the actual frame: the roughly fourteen-year-old Turks, who were probably born and 'socialised' in Germany, sing traditional laments from their ancestors‚ native country. The incantatory lyrics speak of loosing one's homeland, of deportation, longing and unrequited love. A semantic gap instantly appears between what we see and what we hear, between these streetwise kids in their rapper outfits and the archaic folk tunes: „I beg you, little gazelle/Stay away from the cloudy Urfa mountains/They will chase
you and/Separate you from your beloved parents.

The off-voice indicated in the title of the work thus refers by association to the teenagers‚ kinfolk who presumably taught them the songs. The children become a mouthpiece for their parents and grandparents the first-generation immigrants, whose feelings they reflect and implicitly make their own. The paradox could hardly be bigger: the lament, an expression of uprootedness handed down through the centuries, is updated by means of an anachronistic transfer.

For Voice Over, Aladag has used few post-production effects; instead, her interventions are minimal, and entirely aimed at tuning in viewers‚ attention to the near meditative atmosphere. The drum sequences are composed like still lives, while the lighting on the singers directs the eye to their facial expressions by nearly blending out the background. In both cases, we are shown a metaphorically analogue process: like instruments, the adolescents are attuned by a natural process.

Translation: Boris Kremer