Sombra grande. Maximiliano Schonfeld

A few years ago a person appeared in Argentina claiming to speak an ostensibly lost indigenous language: Chaná. In only a short time dictionaries were published and the language was completely recovered. That man, named Blas Jaime, situated the Chanás in the same place where today the descendants of the Volga Germans, in the Entre Ríos province, are inexorably losing their Germanic dialect. Born from this tension between two cultures coexisting in the same space is Sombra grande / Big Shadow, a feature film premiered in San Sebastian’s Zabaltegi-Tabakalera section this year by the Argentine moviemaker Maximiliano Schonfeld.

With the same title, this video installation is dominated by the presence of Blas Jaime who, from the big centre screen, converses with the actors portraying the Chanás in the film. These people appear dotted over the space on several television sets emanating an expression, a rhythm and a soundscape that recreate a Chaná settlement based on the scarce existing historical descriptions.