Passages Paysages

"sequences of implied events, for what is present to the viewer is only the remnant, the memory"

Cha developed the three-channel video installation Passages Paysages for her MFA thesis exhibition of the University Art Museum (now BAMPFA) in 1978. To create the work, the title of which riffs on the French word for landscapes, Cha filmed a series of still photographs, propelled forward by the lilting cadence of Cha's voice narrating a text on memory, ancestry, and homeland. The images and sound in Passages Paysages do not directly relate to one another. As Cha wrote in a description of the work, it "experiments with three languages in their written form and spoken form," using images as "sequences of implied events, for what is present to the viewer is only the remnant, the memory."