Intertwining Outer and Inner Worlds: The Visual Letters of Chantal Akerman and Fiona Tan

Created for the exhibition Mountains and Molehills presented at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam in 2022-2023, Fiona Tan’s video installation Footsteps (2022) features a montage of Dutch archival film footage from 1896 to the late 1920s. Over the course of 97 minutes, one witnesses the transition of a nation from an agrarian to an industrial society while hearing, in voice-over, a reading of the letters the artist’s father wrote to her when she moved from Australia to The Netherlands to study in 1988. The use of footage that does not directly correlate with the audio narration recalls Chantal Akerman’s 1976 News from Home in which we hear the filmmaker read excerpts from the correspondence of her mother when she moved from Belgium to New York in 1971 while on screen, one is presented with long shots of different views of Manhattan at ground level. Tan and Akerman are themselves connected through a letter that the former wrote to the latter in 1998, at the invitation of the Dutch journal Skrien, in which she penned: “Films can be ‘visual letters,’ epistles posted in the void.” This paper will analyze how News from Home and Footsteps function as visual letters and how Akerman and Tan proceeded to intertwine, through a combination of words and images, their outer and inner worlds. Furthermore, analyzing these works as a form of personal archive activation, this paper will discuss how they deal with universal themes such as coming-of-age, family love, gender identity, and migration.