30 Years 21 Minutes 17 Tapes, Return Trip

While I was a graduate student at UC San Diego in the early 1990s, I began working with my family’s collection of 8mm and Super 8 home movies. Some of the footage was shot by my own parents and some of it by other family members, mostly in Finland and in Lebanon. Most of the footage had no soundtrack. I shot additional Super 8 footage, adding it to the older material and making new films, and also added sound from a variety of sources: language learning cassette tapes, fables and family stories recounted by my relatives, songs my brother and I improvised and recorded together as children, and interviews that I conducted with my parents, asking them to recount family events or often-told family stories. This yielded a collection of very short videos, ranging from under a minute to a few minutes long, which became the piece 30 Years 21 Minutes 17 Tapes. When shown originally, each video was on a separate VHS video tape with a title on the spine. There was no prescribed sequence for viewing the tapes: a viewer could select a title, view the video, and then choose another. In this way, each viewer had an experience of the material that built a loose story out of fragments in a different order.

I revisited this piece for an exhibition at testsite in Austin, TX, in 2013. For this show, I decided to sequence the works into one continuous piece and to title it Return Trip. As curator Regine Basha wrote, “Many of Katchadourian's current interests are present as seedlings in this early work: concerns with family relations and storytelling, taxonomies, an attentiveness to nature, an attraction to the absurd and to sonic/visual interplay, and a desire to mingle the everyday with the sublime.”

30 Years/21 Minutes/17 Tapes (1991-1993) and Return Trip (2013).