Andrea Morbio and Carol Sabbadini

Sciogli la lingua tra i rovi, 9’35”, 2012

Sciogli la lingua tra i rovi seems to have grown out of a very complex process. Can you talk about its genesis?

Sciogli la lingua tra i rovi is our first collaboration.
The work was born from our fascination with dialects, the mechanisms and the essence of translation. This particular work was inspirited by an ancient tale in dialect, which today is still narrated in the Mantova and Brescia regions. It is part of the oral tradition but not of the written one.
Using the method of simultaneous translation from the original language into our mother tongues (Spanish and Italian), we tried to underline the process of codification, de-codification and sequentiality of language (in this case dialect), as a reminder of the mechanism of oral narration, in which stories mutate and transform from subject to subject, as language mutate when it’s submitted to translation (change of sound, rhythm, sometimes also meaning).
This audio piece focuses on how to conserve the margin of uncertainty and improvisation that characterized this kind of narrative form – it became a sort of linguistic sport; a new folk play.

Why did you decide to use 3 different languages (Spanish, French and the Brescian dialect)?

We decided to work with two neo-latine languages and one dialect because they are connected between them. Historically the Brescian dialect was influenced by Spanish and ancient French. The familiarities of many words and of some phonemes are the direct evidence of this. However we didn’t want to point up this kinship, since we were interested in including the dialect inside the story in a disjointed way, as it was a magical language of which we don’t recognize the content by the sound only.

Before the listening session, you will give out some drawings to the audience. Can you talk about them?

When we chose the story we were not interested in a traditional revival, but instead in the essence of the children tales, of their simplicity and their sonorous and mnemonic characteristics. The first step, was to translate the original oral story into a written story and then also into visual images that had to work as a souvenir and as an instrument to support the audio piece. We created a new story, in which the dialect lives only as sound and the drawings replace it, as if it was a graphic expression or language. They are our sort of interpretative transference of the translation and transformation process.