WHOSE LANGUAGE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND is a cinematic exploration of the work of Austrian writer Marianne Fritz (1948–2007), and at the same time an exploration of linguistic and narrative boundaries. Fritz spent most of her life working on a major literary project – a complex cycle of novels of more than 10,000 pages, which she called “The Fortress”, and which remained unfinished at her death. During a stay in Vienna, the Canadian artist Kim Kielhofner gained access to Fritz’s apartment and archive and thus insight into the way in which the world of the “fortress” was mapped and arranged by the writer. Fascinated by the visual quality of the reference systems developed by Fritz, the layered maps and color-coded filing system – her “second memory” according to Fritz – filled with notes, photographs and index cards, Kielhofner uses this organizational information as a starting point for her own visual investigations. Based on the twelve volumes of Fritz’s 3,392-page work “Whose Language You Don’t Understand”, each one of the twelve members of a team tell in turn from personal perspective about working on a mysterious project. The narrations are accompanied by collages of various Hollywood characters and recurring film footage of landscapes and places. In addition, there are recordings of the Fritz archive, showing its classification systems and individual objects. In reenactments and revivals Kielhofner approaches the formation of these systems and the decoding of their meanings. Through constantly changing duplications and superimpositions of the cinematic material, Kielhofner presents her engagement with Fritz’s work in a staging that reflects its idiosyncratic grammatical structures and systems while, at the same time bringing her own (artist) persona into play as an agent. Objects, places, and characters become insignia and witnesses in a complex universe. Three video loops serve as an introduction to this world, substituting for the accompanying guide “Was soll man da machen.” [What do you do there.] that Fritz published after completing work on “Whose language you do not understand”. It contains a compilation of character descriptions, which are here subscripted by a series of video portraits. Thus, WHOSE LANGUAGE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND can be experienced as an introduction, a new interpretation as well as a homage to Marianne Fritz’s exuberant opus.