Uncertain Meanings: Voice-Off, Subtitles and Postmodern Allegories in My Recent Works

This thesis is about my recent works and some questions intimately related to them, with particular attention to my thesis project; the single channel video, I usually live abroad. This work plays with voice-over in order to discuss its traditional authoritative and absolute meaning. Further, the work reveals the impossibility of establishing an organic unity of meaning, proliferating the possible interpretation of the fragments that constitute the work. I will use the concept of “postmodern allegory” as defined by Jeremy Tambling to interpret my recent works that refer to the historic breakdown of ideologies whose fixed values and meanings seem incapable of interpreting contemporary reality. How can voice-over be used beyond the realms of authority and objectivity that are usually associated with this component of cinematic language? Instead of considering voice-over as belonging to a separate space from that of the images, I propose that it creates an interstitial space for a negotiation between the spoken text and the images. What is at stake for me is not the authority of the voice-over but its possibility to question objectivity through a subjective point of view able to provoke individual reactions among viewers. A second concern is what the potentialities are of the relationship between images and subtitles? The dominant use of subtitles is translation. I propose that there are other more creative uses of texts juxtaposed with images. Subtitles are for example a way to express unspoken thoughts or a possibility to subvert the centrality of the image in movies and videos, they can also create a dialogue instead of a translation in their relationship with the voice. This thesis also refers to a conception of allegory, developed by Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, that is essential in exploring the deceptive nature of the language I use and the meanings I can communicate with it. I am specifically considering postmodern allegories as something distant from traditional allegories. Allegory is a device to express, through the use of fragments, a world in which it is impossible to establish any definitive meaning. Differently than a metaphor, an allegory doesn't state that A=B and it doesn't establish a consecutive pattern in which we associate something specific with one other specific thing, but often it creates a successive pattern open to several interpretations that fracture instead of unifying any further meaning. My recent works aim to feed this pattern.