Yes, You Say That All The Time, 3d Install Sketch
Yes, You say That All The Time
Ethnographic Audio-Video Collage, Stereo 2023
Video/Audio: Maria Thrän
Residency: Marfa Open 2023
funded by Musikfonds Germany
Duration: 24:51 minutes
Duration Trailer: 49 seconds
Research cooperation: Muriel Weinmann, Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2022.
Yes, You Say That All The Time is a 25-minute ethnographical audio-video work based on conversations with local residents about their lived experiences and understandings of gender beyond fixed binary categories.
An audio collage of voices accompanies a split-screen view of the four-way intersection at the center of town. One road leads south toward Presidio, Texas, and the U.S.–Mexico border at Ojinaga; another leads northwest toward Valentine and west toward California. The open horizon becomes both landscape and proposition: seemingly boundless, yet structured by borders.
Through a dialogical structure, Thraen brings different voices and positions into relation without resolving them into a single argument. They keep their own voice outside the interviews, allowing differing relationships to gender, religion, place, and social convention to coexist alongside uncertainty and contradiction.
If gender cannot be contained within fixed binary categories, how do we listen about its complexity together?
Yes, You Say That All The Time leaves this question open, allowing recognition, uncertainty, contradiction, and difference to remain present.
This work is supported in part by Musikfonds, Germany. The artistic research was developed in Berlin in 2022 in collaboration with Muriel Weinmann, a graduate researcher in Gender Studies at Humboldt University.
