Boris Baltschun — Desert Dictionary

The Desert Dictionary is not what one might expect of a dictionary: a compendium of terms, explained, defined, referenced, etc. Instead, Boris Baltschun has focused on a particular area in present-day South Africa, using a mixture of field recordings and voices to narrate a meditation on a desert that ties differing landscapes to a kind of open-ended ethnology of place. I say ethnology because the nature of the recorded voices has that quasi-documentary feel to it – earnest without much effect or feeling – and it is no surprise that some of the source material that finds its way onto Desert Dictionary was initially commissioned for radio. The question is, I guess, why the normal, radio-friendly delivery of Baltschun’s various narrators was not then radically altered to suit the context of a more experimental release? This seems to me a missed opportunity, at the very least to acknowledge in some material way the displacement of one context by the other.