Apartment Portraits consists of three videos inviting viewers and listeners into three small flats in different neighbourhoods of Oslo: one in the city centre, one in a former harbour area by the fjord and one near the forest on city's western edge.
A portrait could be thought of as a reading. A reading involves a temporal course, a division of roles, an exchange of reflection. Who or what is reading here? What is being read? How could we read it as listeners and spectators?
The video screen is split in two. Two camera views seem connected in a vertical counterpoint: when one moves upwards, the other goes down. As the cameras start moving through the first apartment, I hear music. One by one the sound of a flute, a French horn, a cello and a double bass emerge from different locations in the apartment, as if they were threads laid out to lead us to their performers: the free improv quartet Lemur.
In a similar way, Lemur have engaged in musical readings of acoustic spaces. In a project called Critical Band, they have incorporated the unique acoustic fingerprint of a given reverberant space, such as a church or a concert hall, as a fifth instrument in the ensemble through precise acoustic analyses. Before this, they made music for Villa Stenersen in Oslo, a 1939 villa created in a playful take on functionalism by architect Arne Korsmo. The quartet spread out in the villa's rooms, playing individually and together, not unlike what happens in the more everyday surroundings of Apartment Portraits.
From an audience perspective, Skyvelære, Critical Band and the Villa Stenersen project all involved attending to a course of events in physical spaces that I could simultaneously explore with my own body. My eyes were free to follow the stucco ornaments connecting the walls and the ceilings of Galleri 3.14 out of the video frame and into the real, before plunging back into the video. I could listen to my own footsteps on the stairs in Villa Stenersen before a musician played in the same stairwell, or I could move closer to the aisle in Nidaros Cathedral to slightly alter how the sounds of the four players of Lemur mixed in my listening.
In such a perspective approaching the two-dimensional, it is possible to imagine architecture as a score, as visual and spatial rhythms and proportions that may inspire musical action. What the music reads, what role the apartments play in the sound Lemur creates, is however not necessarily evident from the outside. The three portraits have different but internally consistent musical languages – from the short-breathed and energetic to slim, contemplative lines. When the cameras pass the performers, they often seem to be working with internal imaginations, eagerly listening with their bodies, optimizing the sound of their instruments to the surroundings and to each other. The music is improvised, but still appears secure in the sense of a practice in which the musicians are confident.
The video images come over to me as more unstable, more searching. I mean this as a quality, a somewhat different logic than the one the music proposes. The cameras need time to focus. This mechanical, still tentative motion opens a depth dimension in the screen and a counter movement to the horizontal chronology of the cameras. The tentative connects to how one of the cameras seemingly captures random things: a piece of a lamp, a ceiling tile, the corner of a door frame, a socket above a window.
To me, these objects shrink the distance proposed above between registering and narrating. At least the objects tell something about who lives there. The obsession with things also contributes to subdue the site-specific dimension of the three videos. The short snippets of landscape that the camera captures through the windows give me social and geographical associations. But neither video nor music concentrate on site. Perhaps the closest we come is light. Light is clearly different in a narrow street in the city centre, by the sea in the Oslo fjord and on the edge of the forest. It makes me reflect on how light could be thought of as a kind of architectural reverb.
Apartment Portraits premiered in 2018, when Lemur served as artists-in-residenceat the architecture department of the Norwegian National Museum. For Ellen Røed's part, the portraits became the first step in the large research project Image as site. The three apartments in Oslo were selected by the museum. This last curatorial hand was perhaps more accessible to viewers who saw the first public performances: a live concert with video and an audiovisual installation, both presented at the museum.
The camera gaze obviously aims beyond documenting the playing – video and music portray on equal footing. The juxtaposition of the visual and the musical however also meets modal limits. While the cameras give access to the bodies and movements of musicians, it hides the photographer. The photographer's body is affected by the music, while the musicians lack real-time access to the visual registrations.
With video as her central tool, visual artist Ellen Røed has engaged in measuring and registering indoor and outdoor spaces. From the final exhibition of her artistic research project Skyvelære (2014), I remember a timelapse of a gallery space in the city of Bergen, slowly registering the room along two axes. This video met the public in the room it earlier had recorded. It explored the context of its own presentation and directed my gaze towards parts of a gallery space I rarely attend to, such as ceilings.
In Apartment Portraits, such exchanges between the recorded, the composed and the embodied are locked between choices, layers and frames inherent in processes of recording. However, the fact that video and music are captured simultaneously and in one single take at each location, opens the recording format for the uncomposed and unpredictable. In each apartment, Ellen Røed and her photographer also iterated the video recording process with another twist: While recalling the music they just heard, they captured an additional silent version of the recently recorded audiovisual sequence from memory.
The apartments are quite small. Reverb is limited, and the spatial distribution of the performers in different rooms that would be available to a listener in a live setting, is conflated by the recording. In a similarly conflating visual gesture, the cameras often seek towards the edges of the rooms, moving very close to walls and windows.
In dialogue with the artist, I learn that the two video cameras are fixed back-to-back in opposite ends of a boom carried on the photographer's shoulder. In other words, the rear camera is left to itself – no one sees what it records – while still tied to and obliged to follow the front camera. Ellen Røed reveals that one aim behind this construction has been to approach field recording techniques of sound: to record in several directions simultaneously, to register rather than to narrate. Røed aims for the video recording to be informed by listening, as well as to inform the viewer that the camera is carried by a living, moving body.
The boom contributes to the experience of a limited space. It restricts the movement of the two cameras to the outer edges of the rooms, while the distance between the cameras cannot be captured on film. Rather than rooms, the front camera more often captures items that people have brought into them: A record player, a world map, a striped shower curtain. Plants, toothbrushes, elaborate drawings of butterflies. Two helmets for hockey or skateboarding, bed linen, a swing.
In Norwegian, Apartment Portraits translates to Leilighetsportretter. In Scandinavian languages, the word leilighet has two different meanings, both rooted in the verb to lie: It can refer to an apartment, or to an occasion or circumstance, something taking place at a specific time and place, like in the word leilighetsmusikk – which is incidental music, music with a function other than the music itself. Apartment Portraits are recordings of three homes and three circumstances. The recordings break the portraits free from either, allowing for new readings independent of location.
Hild Borchgrevink is an artist, editor and critic. As an artist, she works with relationships between publicness and attention, often through temporary, site-specific installations or interventions. She also has extensive experience as a project manager in the field of new music. 2012-2017 she was the editor of the online magazine Scenekunst.no. She has an MFA in art and public spaces from Oslo National Academy of the Arts and an MA in musicology (UiO) and an equivalent to a BA in creative writing (Skrivekunstakademiet in Hordaland and Kunstakademiet in Tromsø) and performative criticism (Stockholm Uniarts). From the autumn of 2020, she is a research fellow at the Norwegian Academy of Music.