(As the performative act begins, there are four lamps placed in a circle in the middle of the room and a chair and a lectern/table placed to the side. In the role of an archivist who holds the performative act together, Per enters the space and starts off by addressing the audience directly in the first iterations of the score:)
The project Living and Lasting questions the gaps in public archives by drawing attention to stories and their various registers, which may pass almost unnoticed, but nevertheless can transform relations. Through minor gestures embedded in archive work, we are questioning what gets to count and what is given value as memory work.
We began work on this piece in late 2019 when we were invited to make a project for the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Nordic Summer University (NSU) in 2020. NSU is an independent nomadic forum that was started by a group of scholars after the Second World War, including the Danish physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr. The aim was to promote interdisciplinary scholarly exploration by fusing the Humboldtian ideals of learning with the bottom-up, emancipatory learning practices that emerged in the Nordic countries from the 19th century, cultivated by the labour unions and lay-church movements. We all have extensive experience with this organisation through its forum for artistic research.
Our first move was to visit the Danish National Archive in Copenhagen, which holds the historical material of NSU. The encounter with the archive surprised us as an overwhelming and intense experience. The quietude of the place and vastness of the archived material, stored in beige paper boxes, the distinctive smell of old paper, and the confrontation with an acute need to find good strategies for quickly deciding which boxes to examine within our limited time window - all of this was deeply experiential and evocative. The insights that the archive held about NSU’s different stages and historical developments were intriguing. However, the framework of the National Archive, with its bureaucratic procedures, strict regulations, specific seating arrangements, and clinical ambiance of neutrality and solidity, invested with power and authority, made us feel obliged, but also ambivalent, to what the archive as an institution set in motion and performed.
The visit created strong sensorial experiences and many open-ended questions, including speculation on the function of the archive and what the act of storing historical fragments and experiences, secured and preserved for the future, does to us. Afterwards, we immediately began taking into account that which is left out of the archive, and this meant translating its inevitable incompleteness into questions. What does the archive perform? How can we generate a new relation to the materials and concept of the archive? These questions made us reflect upon the performative potential of this particular archive intersecting with our own memories and embodied archives.
The pandemic and its lockdowns added another framework to our collaboration. After visiting the Archive in 2019, we only met in monthly online sessions. However, after the 70th celebration was lost in the pandemic, the core of our project seemed also to have gone. As in Luigi Pirandello’s play, “Six Characters in Search of an Author,”1 we were left in limbo, and we were forced to reconsider the aims of our collaboration. Fortunately, some time ago, Myna came up with an invitation that instigated a new process:
Manchester Friday 19 November 2021
You are invited by the Danish National Archive, which holds the NSU archive, to donate three items from your personal archive to complement the collection.
We all accepted the invitation. In this curated version, titled Living and Lasting, we will share with you some of these items from our personal archives and collections of memories. As both an archive and archivists of this collection, we will host and guide you through this exposition, starting with a short prologue.
Welcome to Living and Lasting:
(Per begins with a performative act that ends by revealing a little heap of packages and leads to the first unwrapping: Luisa’s package. It contains a clay shard. Per examines it and shares it with an audience member who is asked to pass it along. Per points out where the shard should be placed after it has reached the last receiving audience member. Luisa enters the stage and starts to read.)
The basic premise of the poet J.H. Prynne’s "Plant Time Manifold Transcripts" from 1972, is that there exists a form of temporality specific to all plants, wherein the plant’s upper half (or stem) moves forward in time, and the lower half (or root) moves backward in time.2 Prynne proposes that since plants continually engage in a process of regeneration by excavating and appropriating a geological timeline through the roots, which feeds growth, this process creates a loop whereby plants can go back (through the roots) and in a sense, reclaim the past. In Prynne, the past is activated in the present, as a form of reverse transcription and it is the material aspects of a phenomenon, whether the discrete sound letters that form words or the grain of the medium of film, that inform how we understand it.
Wednesday, May 10
Alice met us at the cave house first thing in the morning and we went directly to Monte Testaccio — a thirty-five-meter tall mountain from the second century AD built by enslaved people entirely of discarded ceramic amphorae originally containing olive oil, which was the most important commodity for leveraging political power and economic dominance at the time of the Roman Empire.
First, we tried to enter through the cat sanctuary, which is part of the enclosed official archaeological site. Alice called all numbers available, and we rang all bells but there was no answer. This was one of the locations that we had formally contacted months earlier with a written request to film, but by the time of the shoot today, we had still received no answer.
We walked one-and-a-half kilometers around the entire base of the mountain, stopping to talk with people who work or live there to ask if they had viewing windows that we could film, and then we came up with a schedule. First, we filmed the exposed amphorae terraces from the street outside, and also a viewing window that was cut into the mountain and is now used by a restaurant to store wine in a side room.
Continuing around the mountain, auto repairmen came out of their shop to tell us they had no viewing windows but instead showed us photos from after the war when people, suddenly homeless, slept on mattresses in and around the mountain.
Then we continued circling it to look for other possibilities and met with an eccentric who lives in one of the cave-like spaces carved into the mountain with no plumbing or electricity but a lot of underground space to make his sculptures.
He gave us a tour of his home and showed us the dank cellars formerly used to store wine in the deepest part of the cave. He directed us to a small hole in the wall at the back of the cave and told us to look inside. There was a very strong cold wind blowing towards us from that opening and we understood immediately that the mountain is a living organism. He explained that because of the way the amphorae had been methodically broken and carefully placed, air flowed all through the mountain. “The mountain breathes,” he said, “it is a living thing.”3
(The 16mm loop continues to run for 5 more seconds before the projector is shut off.)
(Per picks up some lamps and moves them toward the remaining packages, unwraps another one, which consists of a bouquet of dried flowers. He smells them, before finding a letter that he opens and starts to read silently while the audience hears the voice of Myna reading.)
Stockport, England
11 July 2022
Dear Per
I send you some flowers, picked this warm afternoon in the garden.
Rose
Astrantia
Marjoram
Their roots I left behind, so they might flower again next spring.
By the time they reach you in Oslo, most likely they will have died; they have no beating heart, so you can’t check; but their seeds are already forming.
I was going to ask you to wrap them carefully in acid-free tissue paper and place them in a box in an archive; to perform an archiving ritual. This strikes me now as rather absurd. Flowers don’t need to be archived: their seeds make them efficient self-archivists. Except that now of course flower systems don’t work so well because humans are messing up their ecologies. So, yes, do archive them. Keep them in the dark so the light doesn’t fade their glorious colours.
Better though to leave them in the archive of the soil.
As I look now, more closely, at the quivering stamens, green tips and tiny veins of the astrantia petals, they are pure overlooked beauty that surely can’t help but survive in some form or other. Except that now such reassurances sound hollow: nothing more than the obligatory note of hope. I looked up the obligatory note of hope website (it is part of Jenny Offill's marvellous book, Weather) and found that, actually, it isn’t ironic, it is really obligatory, it is your responsibility not to despair. https://www.obligatorynoteofhope.com/. But how can you believe in something that is obligatory?
These flowers may help a little with the banning of despair, whether blooming in a garden or a wasteland or stored carefully with their seeds in an archive.
With love from Myna
(As the reading ends, Per passes the flowers to the audience, and organizes a place for the letter under a desk lamp that he turns on while stating that the last audience member to receive the flowers can also place them there; then he returns to the unwrapped packages. He quickly unwraps the next one: Camilla’s package, which consists of a book and what turns out to be a pile of photos, which he examines before handing them, one at a time to the audience. We hear Camilla’s voice.)
I started to write a diary in 1988 when I was fourteen years old. They have changed in character over the years, just as the handwriting has, which goes from a neatly shaped pen line to a half-erased quick pencil line that approaches the unreadable.
Some people do not read their diary. I, on the contrary, have used mine to understand something about my emotions and how I sense and experience the world.
Would you please pass on one of the seven photos
April 9th, 2020
I arrived late last night. The greens of the garden and the sunlight in the room calm me down. Today I’m here. I tell myself. Everything is fine. Why then do I feel this pain? The picture of the fire comes back into my mind, and there is the picture on my phone that I really should stop looking at.
Please make a second photo circulate.
It was my luck, and the luck of others, not to be in the building the night it burned. A friend told me she was meant to go and work there late that night. But luckily, she fell asleep reading to her son. With her headphones on, she believes she wouldn’t have gotten down from the fourth floor.
I woke up early this morning. Then I remembered.
The police gave me permission to go into the yard, together with two colleagues. The roof was gone and my window on the fourth floor was burning. A radiator from the fifth floor was hanging down from the ceiling in my room.
A fourth photo, please.
I woke up at seven and saw the missed phone calls from 5:45 and from 6:30 am. Then Olga woke up too. Together we read the article from the national news on my phone. She tried to persuade me to let her see the photo of the fire “in big” on the iPad.
We went to the kitchen to make breakfast. We had a conversation about what was in my studio. My big boards with notes and Olga’s drawings. My performance archives. Posters. Notes. Photos. While talking with Olga, I remembered the big boxes in the corner of the studio.
What was in there?
My diaries.
I was lying in the grass when I thought about the suitcase with all my letters. It was also in my studio. Beautiful love letters. My grandmother’s writing. A cassette with her voice. I sat up. It is like losing her a second time, to lose these documents of remembrance.
Please send around a fifth photo.
Does writing about my loss make me regain something?
The fire apparently started in the garbage shed and quickly spread through the kitchen stairs to all five floors. At first, the hope was that it would stop at the 3rd floor, but by 2:03 am it had a good grip on the 4th and 5th floors and at 7:15 am the separation between these floors crashed down.
Please send around a sixth photo.
A beautiful autumn day, I passed by the building but since the fire, it isn’t possible to get into the yard. Through the gate, I caught a glimpse of how they have started to rebuild the house.
Myna once said in a conversation that we search, and we find something completely different from what we were looking for.
I slowly comprehend how much this search is related to my mother. How I could not name what I felt.
We had a conversation about loss. A friend said the feeling in her changed when she understood that she wouldn’t get over losing her dad by the date she had set for herself, but that it would be spread out over her whole lifetime, with different degrees of intensity.
I might have lost my mother long ago.
Please send the last two photos around.
Departing from my past diaries, I in the Journals performance reactivated different moments of my life, feelings and thoughts. The project circled around memory and affect. The diaries were written between 1988 and 2020.
During 2018 – 2019 I performed the piece twelve times.
I look at the photo documentation of the performances I have already done. I loved these diaries. And I loved myself through them. The first one I wrote when I was fourteen until seventeen. It was light pink until I painted it green some years later.
On May 8, 2020, my studio burned down together with twenty-six of the diaries.
Please send the list around.
What sense does it make that I have lost these books? Luisa, on the same evening of the fire, said that it is rare in a digitized world to lose something in this way and to gain such an experience.
I have the impression that I have lost myself in different ages. In different moments of my life. The girl, the young woman, the traveler.
In the Journals performance, I explore the fundamental difference between reading a diary text for oneself and reading with and for others.
I often think about something that I lost in the fire.
On July 5th, 2021, I completed my first diary since the fire.
This one goes to the Danish National Archive.
(When Camilla finishes reading, Per turns on a third desk lamp and puts the book under it, and asks the last audience member receiving the photos to also place them there. He then turns to open the last package: Per’s package. It contains a teacup. He turns on the last desk lamp, places the teacup underneath it, and begins.)
For the connoisseurs of Porcelain, this teacup is a Herend piece. For me, a piece of memorabilia, bought in Budapest in the early 1990s.
I got to know Budapest in the early 1980s when Hungary still was run as a one-party, Marxist-Leninist-based, and semi-liberal totalitarian regime, called the Hungarian People’s Republic. This coarse political reality abruptly collapsed and disappeared in the early 1990s, and left only a ghostly shadow of what has been.
The teacup, as remains, a leftover, evokes the passage of time, what was once there, before the communist revolution and its regime came into power, before the Holocaust and the interwar years with its fascist Hörty regime and the tragedy of the Great War with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It evokes “the world of yesterday,” which also is the title that the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in 1941 gave to his book about pre-First World War Austria-Hungary.4
As remains, resurfacing after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the teacup wasn’t any longer a potentially dangerous object to possess, an incriminating item that could turn you into a suspect, a class enemy of the people, which could bar you or your children from education and positions in the society. The cup had instead become an asset that could be displayed to suggest family ties to the past, the pre-war establishment, and hence rather provide a discreet but clear demarcation line to the by now discredited communist regime.
As memorabilia, the cup holds for me all these layers of stories, of past riches, tragedies, survival and traumas, and evokes the Budapest I come to love, and that Péter Nádas describes in his book Parallel Stories.5 Budapest was the first place where I lived on my own, alone, away from my family and childhood friends as a young man, in a time before any social media would keep you busy and in check. For me, Budapest was love at first sight. I felt at home there, temperamentally and intellectually, despite the political system and the layers of history and culture that set us apart, but as a fast and willing learner, I dived into it and tried to absorb whatever I could learn, even the complicated language, which I regrettably never was able to keep up when life took me elsewhere, so “Istenem, Jesu Maria” as my Hungarian landlady often would exclaim, the reality is that I: “Nem jó beszelek màgyarùl, hanem a kicsit,” meaning “Oh my God, Jesus and Mary”, - “I do not speak Hungarian well, only a little." But some expressions linger, like the beautiful one: “Édesanyám,” which literally means, “sweet mother mine,” and to which I would add: “Szeretlek, csókolom.”
But as there will always be something that slips, even through the most thorough archive and archivist, I will stop here. Living and lasting.
