With Love, Nanay PS.
2026, balikbayan boxes, wooden pallet, film, duration 10’02”, choreography by Tomer Zirkilevich, performance by Nur Giménez Villarroya and Elisa Bruder, letter read by Yolanda Frisch–Ibarra, sound edit by Laura Süess
A language that sounds familiar and yet remains incomprehensible. [...] A decades-long correspondence between Pearlie Frisch’s mother and her grandmother in the Philippines forms the starting point for the video work With Love, Nanay PS. Driven by homesickness, the correspondence was conducted in Tagalog, a language Pearlie Frisch herself does not speak. The letters are materially present, yet their content remains inaccessible to the artist. Together with choreographer Tomer Zirkilevich, she translates this linguistic gap and the intergenerational memory it contains into a performative visual language. Two figures encounter one another, while Pearlie Frisch remains present behind the camera as a third, involved figure. The camera’s perspective becomes both a mediating and observing counterpart, situated between intimacy and distance, trust and uncertainty. Language thus emerges both as a means of connection and as an experience of absence, estrangement, and misunderstanding.
Exhibition text written in German by Barbara Ruf
The production of this piece was kindly supported by:
Philair Logistics, Kloten