French Stamps

The installation French Stamps, consists of three hundred rubber stamps bearing quotations from members of the Francophone community of Chicago appertaining to various places in the city. As a result of the visitor‘s participation, an enormous map is gradually produced on the gallery wall, relating to the topography of Chicago; it becomes a true register of individual stories within a speech community.

Replacing (Über-setzen) - text by Sonja Neef

The encounter of home and foreign takes form in the video work “Paris-Weimar” as a journey, as a “between locations”, in traversing, in “übersetzten” (translating) which in German literally means re-placing – which means: from here to there, changing from one bank of a river to the other, from the native to the not-native. Whoever “trans-lates” or has been exiled or has been a guest often searches for belonging or community within a diaspora community. They often first organize themselves via a linguistic identity, like in the so-called “groupe du mercredi”, a Francophone group that has been meeting in Chicago for many years and whose gathering has become an object of the titular video work by Boisseau and Westermeyer.

The act of translating also represents the motor of the installation “French Stamps”:
• Rubber stamps are embossed with Chicago street names: Michigan Avenue or Lakeshore Drive
• The street names refer to an existing spatial order/a city map that is newly ordered in the installation through the printing of stamps on the wall
• A text forms from this new topography: a hypertext-like narration, a collage of fragments whose syntax is spatially organized via the relay of the stamps. 
• The narration on the wall is not immediately legible and calls for a little effort: it is double coded through both syntax of topography as well as the “foreign language” of French. 
• Whoever can’t crack the code needs the help of a translation book. Its purpose consists of 1. decoding the code French-German, and 2. determining a main path through the hypertext – re-territorializing de-territorialized textual embellishments.
Translation
= but only a possible print version: innumerable alternative readings would be possible and they are always communicated through the interactive organization of the installation. 
= A complex process with many relays/switches: the street name, the city map, the text fragments on the stamps, the wall text, the translation book not only A to Z but also translations that transfer into a multidimensional and “folded” levels in the sense of Deleuze’s Mille Plateaux. Translation is a networked task.