The installation was created specifically for the two identical spiral staircases on either side of the front hall. The stairs had been used by women, who were segregated on the second floor, above the men on the main floor. In one stairwell text was applied in chalk to the stairs.

160 photographs, which were mostly shot on location with a woman actor before the installation, were placed directly on the wall encircling the left-hand staircase. As an adjunct to the visual fragments, onto the railing was sewn a tactile element: a tight skin of red velvet. While the slowly-vanishing written word existed only in the right-hand stairwell, the images were sequestered in the stairwell on the left. I conceived of the two mirror-image staircases as duelling spaces that actually built on each other as the viewer/participant wound her or his way from stairwell to stairwell, picking up clues as they translated the texts. Unless you could speak both English and Czech, however, it would be unclear as to whether the story would thread together, whether the words were direct translations, or whether they were unrelated fragments. The object of the text becomes as elusive as the woman in the photographs.

Verbal communication can be tenuous, ephemeral. The act of translation, the movement between languages, is an act that creates a new text. Words in English and Czech were written in chalk on the stairs of the right-hand stairwell. The text was a fragmented narrative, playing between the two languages and between our uses of text in different forms. The positioning of the text on the stairs meant there was no escape from interacting with records of past thoughts and actions, and this interaction resulted in a wearing away of the words. Thus, each day the story changed through the erasure of words on the path most well-travelled.

The project interrogated the construction and interpretation of narratives, investigating history read as a system of narratives: letters, books, official documents, news reports, trial transcripts, photographs, etc. Each is a product of human attempts at recording, each a form of translation vulnerable to the desires of the person producing them, transcribing but also transforming events and people and environments.

A mystery to be unravelled, this project emerged from my historical research into the so-called Bloody Countess (Elizabeth Bathory), a 16th-century murderess. After weeks of research in archives and libraries and conducting interviews, I came to the realisation that what I was expecting to find did not, in fact, exist. Information eluded me: her body had gone missing from her grave, her portrait was stolen a year before I arrived at the museum, and all of the writings about her were written by male writers, infected by a moralistic view of the relationship between women and violence.

The process of searching for a semblance of what I could believe to be the truth revealed to me that the process itself was the goal: actively constructing, inventing, imagining history. Desire builds it, destroys it, reconstructs it. Ultimately, I was confronted with my own desire, underlying the supposedly rational and objective assessment of events and records.