THE FREE TRANSLATORS

The Intelligence Community Presents: THE FREE TRANSLATORS
Public information URL: http://www.sabinegruffat.com/FreeTranslators.html

PRESS RELEASE: May 2nd 2008

Reminiscent of the do-it-yourself approach of the Riot Grrrl movement, this Spring two feminist provocateurs are taking their multimedia show on the road. Mary Billyou and Sabine Gruffat are hailing from Brooklyn, NY and Madison, WI to present “The Free Translators” touring east coast cities and towns with a program of radical videos and performances.

As the title suggests, The Free Translators’ video program is inspired by widely accessible texts. The artists perform in many of their own videos, sometimes enacting the news, dictating words written by the Marquis de Sade, or excerpting from Virginia Woolf’s anti-war essays. By re-interpreting the texts for the audience, the videos explore notions of identity and communication, re-imagining issues raised by feminist consciousness, the quality of attention today in the midst of multiple authorial references, and the diminished space of citizenship around the monologue of mass media.

In between video screenings, The Free Translators present two “Live Tactical Translations,” or, live multimedia experiments inspired by 1970s feminist art and Soviet avant-garde news troupes. Culling from their library of text, sound, and image, alter egos Miss Reading and Miss Recognition communicate through matching headsets and manipulate analog recordings as they educate audiences in their unique methods of reading and comprehension.

The Intelligence Community Presents: THE FREE TRANSLATORS
will be touring through these venues:

TOUR DATES:

May 10, 2008 6pm
Gasp Gallery, Brookline, MA.
http://www.g-a-s-p.net

May 17, 2008 8pm
Squeaky Wheel, Buffalo, NY.
http://www.squeaky.org

May 19, 2008 7pm
Union Docs, Brooklyn, NY.
http://www.uniondocs.org

May 20, 2008 7:30pm
Time and Space Limited, Hudson, NY.
http://www.timeandspace.org

May 21, 2008 7 pm
51 3rd Street, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
http://www.rpi.edu

May 23, 2008 8pm
Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD.
http://www.creativealliance.org

May 24, 2008 7:30pm
Pyramid Atlantic Center, Silver Springs, MD.
http://www.pyramidatlanticartcenter.org

May 25, 2008 8pm
Small Change Screenings, Philadelphia, PA.
http://www.smallchangescreenings.com


THE FREE TRANSLATORS are:

Mary Billyou
[email protected]

Mary Billyou is a film and video maker living and working in New York City. She attended The Whitney Independent Study Program in 2003-2004. Her films and videos have shown throughout the United States, the Czech Republic, and in China. Her practice includes community building collaborations through both filmmaking production and in curated screenings. Her recent documentary on Arabic translator Mohamed Yousry showed at the microcinema venue at Sundance 2007. Her early films and videos are available on Big Miss Moviola compilations.

Sabine Gruffat
[email protected]

Sabine Gruffat is a media artist living and working in Madison, WI. Her films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, the Split Film Festival in Croatia and the Ann Arbor Film Festival as well as microcinema venues/ galleries the PDX Film Festival in Portland OR, Discount Cinema and The Ice Factory in Chicago, IL, and more recently, Hull screen U.K, The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago Filmmakers, and The Gramercy Theater in New York. Her photographs and video installations have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General in New York, the Rochester Art Center and the Centro Cultural Telemar in Brasil.