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Lost in the Memory Palace | Road Trip
Road Trip
Interview with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller by Philipp Kaiser
Philipp Kaiser: What is 'Road Trip' about?
Janet Cardiff: 'Road Trip' started because we found a carousel of slides in our basement that
belonged to George's grandfather that he had taken almost 50 years ago.
George Bures Miller: First we were fascinated by how they had aged. Some of the films had
gone completely red and some blue. They were quite beautiful images.
JC: One of the preliminary things we did for that piece was to set the slides up and to set up the
audio recording device and then George and I talked about the images. So we were really
looking at the slides and we weren't thinking of it as an art piece at all.
GBM: Originally we thought that it would be just part of a larger piece. When we watched it
back after we have done the audio we realized that it didn't need anything else that the
combination of us talking about what we were seeing was interesting enough. We ran through
the slides a number of times and polished the situations we weren't happy with and developed it
into a more fictional piece.
PHK: Did you have to restage your first impression?
JC: We really didn't restage…
GBM: I think we did a lot of restaging. (laughs) This is how we work together, we disagree and
we don't remember these things.
'Road Trip' is my grandfather's trip in the 50s from Calgary – he even started further west
because he was visiting his son in Vancouver – across Canada. If you were driving to the East
you had to drive through America. There was no road through Canada over the Great Lakes. He
drove through America and North Dakota, through Minnesota to Ontario where he visited my
parents. The final part of the trip was when he gets to New York. He went there to see a doctor
because he had cancer and this story all comes out slowly through our dialogue. I never knew
my grandfather; he died before I was born but I had been told about him and his death. A lot of
things come up in the first run through that Janet didn't know about it. We found it fascinating
that he was taking these pictures on his trip. If he is dying why is trying to capture these
moments of reality?
PHK: When I first saw 'Road Trip' I was wondering who is talking to whom and what role the
audience plays.
GBM: We thought of the audience as being voyeuristic. They see a glimpse into our lives that
they wouldn't normally see. We're having a conversation by ourselves and they are watching
us.
PHK: How autobiographical is this work for you?
GBM: It is a kind of family myth. We just found the slides and knew that my grandfather had
to go the specialist. So we don't know if this really is his last trip but we told the story as if it
was this trip. It is like us being a detective tracing his journey. People do that all the time with
family albums and photos. It's a lot about discovering or placing yourself inside the pictures
too. The idea where we start arguing about the route…I have done the drive across Canada and
through the States about fifty times.
JC: I had taken the slides out and reordered them and thought it was the order of going across
Canada but they weren't correct.
GBM: So to me it was really important that the slides were in the natural geographic order and
made sense as a trip. So at one point in the audio we have a bit of a fight about that and we used
this for the piece. It gave us the idea too to create the fiction of backing up the projector and
simulating that we are reordering it.
JC: This man was really into photography. We found a newspaper clipping of him getting this
Nikon camera from his boss for 50 years of service and that's probably the camera he used for
these shots. But to me it wasn't the family thing that is interesting about the piece. It's not like
us to do that kind of personal thing, even though the walks seem to be very personal. Most of
the time the audio walks are very fictional. What became interesting was the idea of
photography: All the shots he took were very artistic, they were about composing landscapes,
and they really were about looking.
GBM: Did he have a sense of his death when he took these last images? We don't actually
mention in the piece that he will die. We thought New York was an appropriate place to end.
PHK: You have been working together for more than 20 years. 'Road Trip' is so much about
constructing a narrative that it seems to me that the topic of the artistic collaboration is crucial
here.
JC: That was really one of the interesting things for me after hearing what we had recorded for
the first time. It was a recreation of two people talking. It was a portrait of George and me, a
collaborative relationship and the way our voices become these virtual artists controlling the
slide projector was creepy in an interesting way. I think collaboration as such would be a too
dry topic for us in general but it's definitely a subtext.
Philipp Kaiser, "Interview with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller," in
Held Together with Water: Art from the Sammlung Verbund
, Hatje Cantz, 2007