Katarina Zdjelar
Shoum
The Netherlands
About
Shoum starts with a blank screen. There is no image, only the sound of the Tears for Fears’ 1984 mega hit Shout. Finally, there appears an iPod, a sheet of paper and the hands of two men from Belgrade, holding pens.
Over the course of the next seven minutes, Shoum depicts two attempts of deciphering the lyrics of Shout as though they contained a coded message. The two men speak no English and so they phonetically transcribe what they hear, based on their own vocabulary and capacity to vocally interpret the unfamiliar. Cut off from the lingua franca of a globalised world, these two men create something of their own, something that lies between the foreign and the familiar.