Portfolio - Marie Thams - Visual artist

person

2022

Filmwork

16:00 min, HD film, stereo soundscape

still image, person

still image, person
Film stills, person

person examines the term "chairperson" versus "chairman", by which the artist takes up how the gendered word emerges from a linguistic tradition that reproduces limiting ideas about gender and the distribution of roles in society.

The subject unfolds in the film's soundscape, where Thams’ own voice is heard in two overlapping tracks. In one, information about important events in the history of inclusion and gender equality is provided – ranging from the execution of the French women's rights campaigner Olympe de Gouges in 1793 to Aarhus City Council's recognition of the titles "chairperson" and "chairwoman" in 2018, among other examples. In the second voice track, children voices join the artist’s voice reciting, singing, and whispering certain words and phrases that connect the historical impacts to a larger reflection on the habits, structures and the importance of language in building our imagination and horizon.

Along the way, the film opens to its core: a call to free the genders from oppressive mechanisms in language by using and understand it more nuanced and neutrally. In the filmwork, Thams puts the question of gendered and exclusionary language into a larger perspective and indirectly extends a hand to the future generations, as those who have the right to define the language of the future and their own leeway. Which is further expressed in the young voices and the work's visual body, where you hear playful children drawing new horizon lines – combined with meditations on the orchestration of the conference room, table, and participants.