The Mime and the Ape / Nature See You
Erik Bünger
— Video screening
The Mime and the Ape
In the film Silent Movie (1976), a film director places a phone call to Marcel Marceau to ask him to star in a silent film. The world-famous mime picks up the phone and shouts “No!”. Thirty-five years later, the exact same stunt is repeated by Cesar, the chimpanzee protagonist in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). Previously a speechless animal, he suddenly grabs the cattle prod out of the hands of his human prison guard and shouts “No!”.
In the two-channel video installation The Mime and the Ape, a narrator returns again and again to these two scenes, treating them as two origin stories. If one scene takes us back to the origins of sound film, the other takes us all the way back to the origins of human language. With the help of the two scenes, the narrator weaves a winding tale about the inability of language to articulate its own origin.
The Mime and the Ape is a commission by Audiorama in Stockholm, funded by The Swedish Art Council. The research was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [AR 688].
More about The Mime and the Ape
Nature See You
In November 2015, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris, a video was uploaded on the internet in which Koko, a gorilla trained in the use of American Sign Language, addresses world leaders directly. She chastises humanity and calls for immediate action to save herself and the nature she is part of. In his video essay Nature See You, Erik Bünger invites a sign language avatar to comment on Koko’s use of words. The avatar tries again and again to reformulate the impossible position in which Koko finds herself as a spokesperson for nature: to communicate her message to us, she has to use words. But in order for this message to remain true to nature, she has to remain wordless.