artingeneral:

I have been spending a lot of time with this work by Lisa Tan. Titled Sunsets, the work documents an informal translation and transcription (Portuguese to English) of a 1977 interview with the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977).

Lisa Tan has been spending a lot of time in Sweden for the past few years, and anecdotally relates the origin of this piece:

“…it relies on the most banal topic, something that I thought you really shouldn’t talk about anywhere, but especially at certain latitudes because its presence is so achingly obvious: the weather. Or really, it’s about the light. The footage in the video was shot in Sweden at either 3am during the summer, or at 3pm during the winter. I look at this liminal zone, when it’s not really day or night, or when the sun sets too slowly or too rapidly, as a way of connecting to certain values of productivity and the generative liminal space of translation—of not knowing exactly—or of getting things wrong. So last summer, I woke up in the mid- dle of the night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, when the sleep function on my laptop showed slowly shifting views of our solar system, insisting that I was not supposed to be working, no. I started filming my laptop in this mode, thinking that right now, the computer is perhaps most interesting when it’s asleep.”

Excerpt from Lisa Tan’s Sunsets, 2012.