Whose Language You Don’t Understand

This video is named after a novel of the same name by Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948−2007). She spent most of her life, over 30 years, working on a cycle of novels she called The Fortress, consisting of over 10 000 pages — and still unfinished at the time of her death. This work has created a visual language of repetition and a collage that mimics the formal and conceptual constraints in Fritz’s work. There are twelve sections to the video, one for each of the volumes of Fritz’s book. These sections are told from the perspective of each member of a team working on a dense, difficult and mysterious project. Each section confronts the philosophical and practical limitations involved in telling a history.