The interweaving of elements at Fossekleiva kultursenter was quite different from the one at Bragdøy. Here I had a long research period, with help from Hanne Synnøve Østerud, Department Director, Vestfold Museums, and access to archives with permission to use the visual material freely. I also had a space, where parts of a turbine where still present, a historical element in itself (the cultural centre is situated in the building of an old textile factory), and full financial support to work with the installation (Norwegian Cultural Council, 2016). This time I could also work with visual as well as textual interweaving. Through an origami tessellation technique, I folded about eighty pieces of paper and attached them together to create a long projection screen, on which images of my grandmother and the place she lived were shown. The screen was then deconstructed partially and integrated into the machinery underneath, with a projection of a historical map of Fosskeleiva on the floor. The films, presented in small boxes, were a collage, or an interweaving of archival material, my own photographs, and digital manipulation of the material. The stories told were pre-recorded and manipulated, accompanied by soundscapes also created by me. My grandmother’s story was also written on a sheet of paper, as a part of one of the participatory strategies – The Book of Ruins.
Working with English as the language of the installation has from the beginning allowed me to experiment and play with the meanings of words and phrases differently than when using Danish. It makes the poetics of the interpretation transparent, honest, and frail and creates distance at the same time.
A text adapted from the book The Watch Maker by Gert Nygårdshaug created another explanation for the layers and their interweaving and drew in my conceptual approach to the understanding of time:
At Fossekleiva two local historical facts became important for one of the films and the interweaving stories. In 1914 a little boy drowned in the pond created by a small dam for the purpose of manufacturing electricity for the factory. I was also told that there was a distinct ritual that the children of the workers at the factory performed each evening. They would stand at a specific spot by the pond and wave to their mothers working inside the factory until late at night. In that way, their mothers would know they were safe.
The words ‘waving’ and ‘waves’, as well as ‘weaving’ when pronounced by a foreigner, have a similarity to one another and a visual relationship. Here ‘weaving’ also had a double connotation – through the interweaving process and through the fact that the Fossekleiva Cultural Centre was previously a textile factory. Through the visual material and interweaving of the first text written for Ruins – Ruins of a Childhood – the several levels of sites included in the installation and the way history and stories were manifested, I aspired to introduce what I later began to call micro-universes, with clues and triggers for the audience to respond to.
Did you know that there are time bubbles, floating horizontally in an infinite number of parallel layers above and below each other? They show that situations have vertical cracks in them, but also that each and every one of us is in an infinity of times all the time. As a consequence, to that notion, one could presume that time simply does not exist.
Stories told and interwoved consist of:
Weaving through walls
Ruins of a Childhood – established in the previous installation
Reinvented metaphors from different elements and time as a theme
your are me. we are the ruins of our childhood. you and I followed each other, through time. you held my hand. I did not notice. I am you. we are the ruins of our future.
there is always a forest. is there not? and a lake, or a pond. always a forest we used to play in. explore. run around in. hide in. disappear in.
children always roam in the forests nearby.
we did. did we not? you would run ahead. and I would follow. through time. through the walls of dust. the humid air. water drops.
wedging ourselves through the cracks.
you held my hand. I did not notice.
hand in the air. you let go of mine.
to our mothers.
waving through walls
…..
I was Hovering over the water. Looking through the sky, the drops, the time. At you. Floating under. Hovering above. You and I follow each other. Floating. Hovering. Through time. I will always hear your cry. through walls. We are the ruins of our future. I stretched my hand. So did you. Almost there. Bursting in to thousands and thousands of star drops, over the water, over the sky. Particles of you, of me, through time