The installation APPROACH borrows its text from Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, written in Italy almost 700 years ago. Dante’s poem is concerned with man’s search for meaning and not least for the inexplicable or intangible.
On entering the installation APPROACH you hear voices reciting the first 13 verses of “Paradiso”, and you meet the visual side, in which a number of persons recite the same verses, but in sign language. The 13 verses contain Dante’s deeply felt prayer to Apollo to give the poet the strength to hold onto just a little part of what he has seen on his journey.
The sound track and the visuals thus tell the same story, but in different languages. Caught between these two languages, the visitor to the installation is sharply confronted with the fundamental situation of our relation to the surrounding world, the constant necessity of interpretation. The ideal of unambiguous communication does not exist. We are always in a field of interpretation, and even though we speak the same language, it is not given that we understand the same thing.
