Answering Machine Tape Travels

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  • Answering Machine Tape Travels

  • Artist: Rajee P. Jejishergill
  • Year: 2016
  • Duration: 5:16
  • Country: Canada
  • Answering Machine Tape Travels follows Rajee’s diasporic family through various locales—Toronto, Montreal, New Delhi, Udaipur and Bazpur—using home movie footage shot between the early 1980s and recent years. This re-mixed footage is paired with snippets of old answering machine tape messages from family homes in Winnipeg and Surrey, B.C., as well as a partial recording of the song We Are Trapped by the artist’s mother, Rose Paña Jejishergill (from the same answering machine tape). Both the audio and video recordings have degraded over the years, referencing memory’s way of becoming distorted over time. This lack of trust in memory is further suggested by the vague, sometimes difficult to interpret imagery, as well as the general eeriness of the emotive soundtrack, a song of longing and despair. The tension between the obscure, almost abstract imagery of travel and the fading clarity of the taped sounds of home—and the sound of not being at home at the moment—evokes the idiosyncratic relationships that exist within this family.

  • Accession #: 7160
  • Distribution Status: In Distribution
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