Lexicon of vanishing words

Lexicon of vanishing words is a poetic portrait of Iratxe Jaio’s father, who started having difficulties holding on to his memories. This compelled him to embark on a frantic mission: to record every fleeting thought and recollection before it might slip into oblivion. Within a year, he filled several boxes with scraps of paper, containing memories, word lists, and colloquial expressions in his mother tongue, Euskara. In that same year, he also took around 14.000 photos of the things he encountered in his everyday life.

Jaio’s film combines digital video and super-8 film footage of her father as he revisits scenes from his past life with a little help from his grandchildren. In voice-over, we hear him read out passages from his notes.

A selection of the photos taken by him is printed out in rows on large sheets of paper, and presented next to the film. To navigate the load of images her father captured, Jaio used an AI image-recognition tool to categorize and interpret them. Small screens show the resulting descriptions, which veer from uncanny precision to wild inaccuracy.

Memory is vulnerable. Jaio engages with her father’s desire to leave something for posterity, while probing the limits of how much of someone’s inner world can really be found in the traces they leave behind.

Direction: Iratxe Jaio
Camera, editing and creative advice: Klaas van Gorkum
Audio design: Iratxe Jaio
Sound mastering: Roel Meelkop
Super-8 film development and digitization: Andec Film Berlin

Made thanks to TENT, production house for Rotterdam artists.