Subtitled Liberation

Subtitled Liberation

Single channel video projection, silent.
Running Time: 09:26 minutes

Subtitled Liberation brings together the challenges which a person who stammers may face in day-to-day conversation, in a silent moving image work.

The black screen removing all context of who the speaker is, symbolising the judgement placed upon the person who stammers from the listener, not focusing on the person themselves, but more so in how they are speaking. Removing these facial features places focus on what’s being spoken. The nature of the subtitling represents the length of utterances a person who stammers will be able to identify with as ‘blocking’. A person who stammers, who may identify themselves as having a ‘severe’ stammer, this could be something they may experience on a daily basis. The conscious decision for this work to be silent signifies the silence felt both by the person who stammers and the listener, as they anticipate the next word or sentence from the person who stammers.
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The temporality of the text’s appearance on the screen resembles the nature of 21st Century internet communication, a person who stammer’s saviour or perhaps avoidance strategy for face-to-face interaction. Many people who stammer find comfort in the power of the internet as another powerful means of expressing their identify.