The club is on the ground floor, where Balearic beats pump out of oversized speakers, bruising the air. The chill-out room’s downstairs, through the inches-thick metal door of the vault in this former Midland bank. Let’s take the club first. Anri Sala’s video Mixed Behaviour (2003) opens up with an ambiguous-looking shot that resolves itself into an image of a DJ cueing up some turntables under a rain cover. The music starts amid a sonic scuffle of raindrops detonating on the tarp, and an establishing shot reveals that the DJ is on a roof, playing for a nocturnal city whose residents can’t be seen. (Additional information: this is Tirana, Albania, on a wet New Year’s Eve in 2003.) Explosions rip through the sky – fireworks, adding further dramatic crackle to some conservative tribal-house tunes. Screamers arc dramatically over the DJ’s head. As the music blasts around the gallery, changing a couple of times over the course of the film’s eight-minute duration, and the image (replayed on a small monitor and thus resolutely anti-spectacular) plays on without much variation, one realises that the bulk of one’s experience is auditory. In the mix, equal space is given to the music and the event’s texture – the whizzes and bangs of fireworks, which can’t help but sound like more warlike detonations – particularly in the context of Sala’s work, which on more than one occasion has probed the dislocations of contemporary Eastern Europe, the legacies of totalitarianism and the travails of present-day militarisation.





A friend of mine who recently moved to a rough part of LA was initially impressed that, on the evidence of her ears, the locals set off fireworks every night. She asked a friend what all the bangs were celebrating. He looked at her in disbelief. Conversely, an individual who has lived through certain traumas will even jump at the sound of a slammed door. But Sala’s film is not solely some act of simple equivalencing, poeticising a violent undertone even on a night of celebration (although it’s not accidental that it does do so). It’s not even precisely an exploration of cultural translation – of how some Western 4/4 beats ended up rocking Eastern Europe, although that is part of its deeper background. It’s about interpretation, about what we think we’ve seen and heard when languages mix. Look closer at the film and, contrary to what is usually the case, the fireworks and their booms seem to be synced to the music. Forcibly so. At points, the film seems to reverse, the outward bloom of an explosion sucking back into itself, then outward again. This is not a documentary but a manipulated exploration of the polyvalence of information carried by sound. Sound defines the image; sound, here, defines the world, and a language – one that resonates thrillingly in the solar plexus, underscoring a latent violence in the beats – is born in the dialogue between the world’s noises and the DJ’s music. What’s not acknowledged, and how could it be, is that hip-hop has been punctuating rhythms with gunshots and sirens for years, creating a soundworld which is equal parts street and beat. Evidently Sala’s not a Dr Dre fan.

Downstairs, in the darkened vault (where, ratcheting up the tension a notch, a guard stands outside to let one out should that heavy door swing shut), a language is again in the process of becoming, and again becomes loosely tied to a socio-political trajectory. Làkkat (2004) was shot in Senegal, and initially is all black screen, sound and subtitle. It’s a dialogue, we can tell, even though the language is Wolof. Two children are being taught a new tongue, and the words they are being taught are significant. The boy is struggling with ‘shining’ – apparently, he keeps saying ‘dining’ (although the second word probably isn’t ‘dining’; the rhyme is a symptom of subtitling, and the first sign that we are linguistically adrift). Now he’s being taught more words: ‘light-skinned’, ‘lighter’, ‘whitey’, ‘pale-skinned’, ‘alien’, ‘dark’, ‘very dark thing’, ‘outlandish’. We see the boys’ faces. The language is loaded, and again it is not the only sonic element. That faint chinking sound is butterflies hitting a strip-light which, seen in recessive perspective, burns through the darkness and punctuates the footage of the boys. Towards the end, we see that a man is controlling the boys’ intonation with hand movements, like a conductor. The boys have become very skilled at responding, but they have a scared look in their eyes.

Sala has a phobia of spelling things out, preferring to keep one foot in the documentary camp, even as he tweaks his material to make it appear to be running an oblique internal commentary on itself. The word làkkat means ‘one whose native tongue is different from the language of the place where he is’, which also suggests linguistic imperfection. Clearly some of the subtitles are wrong. The children are expertly absorbing a partial view of language. The blind movement of the butterflies towards the light is an obvious metaphor but, in context, its meaning isn’t clear at all. And in the meantime, something is being communicated to the viewer – an idea of geographical instability that has resulted in hybrids, yet an idea which is overtaken by a sense of complete uncertainty generated by the structure of the artwork itself and even by its site-specificity. As ever with language and communication, it’s about what you don’t say, as much as what you do. If by that notion Sala wants not only to suggest worldly flux but also to focus attention back on the person behind the camera – who selects, frames, cuts, and isn’t necessarily to be trusted – he succeeds admirably.