route to the site, 2013
On a road trip to North West Scotland I walked to a remote childhood beach and discovered the place where my Welsh speaking but originally Gaelic speaking great grandfather came from following a period of famine and clearances. The film’s title, Route to the Site, is from a text by the artist Robert Smithson (1969), in which he talks about the abstract nature of a highway as compared to the physicality of a trail. Voicing and stumbling over unknown words seems to similarly embody language. In the film, I copy a Gaelic-speaking man and my Welsh-speaking mother to speak words from two passages of Isaiah, which have historical relevance to the places and the loss of the languages.
