Chapter 10

Olga Sacharoff was the starting point. “From the images Anna Dot found and from what she is telling us throughout the video”1, which was made later, when she was thinking of a way to go public with what had happened in the performance. “But in a way that is not seen as performance”2. It’s all connected to her practice since it connects to language and translation. And it also caught her in a moment when she was developing her PhD thesis focused on translation. “She was fed up with academic texts and articles and everything that was related to this realm”3. Besides, it has humor, which is something that she has been used in previous works. A humor that she needed in a moment when that particular academic stance was bothering her. So she thought about using this type of language that was limiting her as a framework of something that is not academic. One could even consider it as a google translator algorithm glitch (that makes one wonders about from where the algorithm is made). One of the aspects she was studying in her thesis was the historical colonial and class gaps in contrast with the translation algorithm we use in our current societies.

1.DOT, Anna. Presentation of a science-fiction paper with the first cubist results of the machine translation russian-english of plants. Traducción Anna Dot. Tallin: Estonia Ed., 1975.
2.________. Based on experiments made with the Google Translate mobile app and this book. Traducción Anna Dot. Barcelona: Museo Picasso, 2001.
3._________. In the paper, the results found are used to speculate on the meaning of the houseplants that appear in the painting Matrimoni (1920), by Olga Sacharoff. Barcelona: Bombon Projects, 1999.

Siskin or a speculative study on the possibility of a language of plants (2018) A lecture, a photographic series and a video by Anna Dot. This project was presented at Museu Picasso, Barcelona (11th January, 2018). It has also been shown in Liste Art Fair 2021, Basel, Bombon Projects’ booth (September 2021).

Anna Dot, Siskin or a speculative study on the possibility of a language of plants, 2018, Digital video, color, audio, 9’ 52’’ (video still)