Second version of the video-poem "Visual Text: Finger Poem" (1968), by Valie Export, conceived after the eponymous photo poem from 1968: "I say what is shown in showing what is said" (freely adapted from Martin Heidegger).
By means of symbolic gestures, a sentence is delivered in sign language, whose wording may only be understood at the end of the performance when the camera pans over a line written on a piece of paper. This is how Sehtext: Fingergedicht defies our concepts of immediate listening and comprehension associated with both hearing and sight. If a literally physical “becoming action” of the verbal is performed, through a language of gestures – in showing by speaking and saying by showing – we can thus identify a dismantling of the hierarchy of the sensory system.
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