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Saskia Olde Wolbers
Saskia Olde Wolbers
Deadline
Video for projection 18 minutes 2007
Image Credit C-type still from Deadline, 2007
18 min DV
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Born in Breda, The Netherlands 1971,
BIO (PDF)
Saskia Olde Wolbers is represented by:
Deadline
Towards the end of Deadline, in an airport terminal after a long journey, the narrator is greeted by “a smiling stranger who yet looks so familiar” and who holds under his arm a book whose cover renders all the elements of this young woman’s preceding voyage as if its predestination: “Do I see rightly under his arm a book, with on the cover a photograph of father’s bush-taxi? And the title Deadline, by Lamin the first Bojang. Underneath in smaller italic letters a quote I think, ‘Do we all have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems like migrating birds? It seems the only way to account for our insane restlessness.’ And in even smaller letters, ‘The remarkable story of an epic voyage undertaken by a man in his desire to travel away from the everyday squalor of his region, that sees him drive a bush taxi from his native Gambia to an airport in Nigeria in a failed attempt to catch a plane to Greece. He spends sixteen months on the road working his way through eight West African countries.’” The narrative returns on itself, unless it starts here …1
Voice over excerpt:
I found myself very far away from home . . .
Father had driven us slowly east . . . in a rattling van . . .
After we traveled almost 3000 miles we parted . . .
And I boarded a plane to fly 8 hours north . . . over matt black deserts . . .
whose tiny settlements looked imprisoned by their fierce surroundings.
At my destination, I was welcomed by the exact same man …
who had earlier waved me off.
These were of course not totally the same man . . .
But my father and my uncle had very similar features.
What told them apart were their surroundings and attire.
While father wore his hair in short dreads,
a crisp England shirt … suit jacket and Sta-pressed slacks . . .
My uncle came to the airport in Athens fully wrapped in traditional robes . . .
Finely starched into the neat angular sketch of a human form.
Forty-three years ago my grandfather’s two wives . . .
had each delivered him a son.
On the very same day . . . in the exact same hour . . .
lying in adjacent rooms of their compound.
Father and uncle were twins with the luxury . . .
of having grown in their mothers alone.
Although the exact timing was fiercely disputed . . .
Both women stubbornly called their sons Lamin . . . the first-born.
But as my uncle was thought to be 3 weeks overdue . . .
and my father a week early . . . Uncle was appointed the elder . . .
and Father had his fate randomly sealed by a mere guess.