WORK DESCRIPTION
LETHE was developed within the premise of the PhD project and shown in the group show “Five forms of Play: ILINX” at Celcius Projects in Malmö in 2020. [1]
The installation consists of eight red metal wires stretched between the walls, converging into two 'floating rectangles' that are vertically aligned in one area of the gallery space. Four string curtains are mounted on the top wire rectangle, with a stool placed inside the lower wire rectangle. This setup creates "a room within a room" where the audience can sit and listen to a sound piece through headphones hanging from the ceiling. The wires also extend outwards, creating disruptive boundaries for the audience and encroaching on the space of the other works in the exhibition.
The sound piece features the artist's voice narrating a journey from the gallery down to the depths of the earth, where Lethe—the river of forgetfulness in ancient Greek mythology—plays a central role. The voice addresses the listener directly in real-time, initially prompting them to relate to the concrete gallery space and installation structure in which they are sitting. As the narrative progresses, this connection gradually shifts as the voice begins to describe the surroundings as mythological places, incorporating more literary movements through space and time.
Eventually, all the locations merge as the narration takes the form of a guided embodiment exercise, inviting the listener to imagine the concrete space of the gallery being flooded by the waters of forgetfulness from the river Lethe.
SUMMARY OF RESEARCH DEVELOPMENT
Throughout this development, I explored how interdimensional movement could unfold as physical movement within an installation, entangled with speculative movements in narrative. In other words, how the audience's position and shifts in perspective within the physical space could intermingle with the perspectival shifts occurring in their minds through their experience of the narrative they listened to.
As such, the work invites the audience to reflectively relate to spatial and temporal movements, as well as movements of their memory. This was to stimulate a sentral question specific to this artistic result, of how experience of delimitation and connection in space can be linked to forgetting and remembering knowledge in the mind.
To develop the spatial installation, I conducted installation tests to explore how string could function as a LINEAR dimension in SPACE. I examined how this could either enhance or diminish the kinaesthetic sense of space, making the audience aware of spatial limitations or inviting them to perceive various points of connection. These aesthetic and material choices engaged the strings as linear connectors and dividers. Here, I realised that the audience percetions of dimensional shifts, where dependednt on how they physically moved through in the installation. I also used strings to create PLANES or walls, forming a spatial "room inside the room," which further highlighted perspectival shifts and invited reflection on the internal and external.
Alongside the spatial and material development of the installation, I aimed to enhance its performative aspect through SPECULATIVE FABULATION within a suggestive narrative. This was intended to augment the audience's linear, planar, and spatial perceptions, moving them in hyperspatial ways and directions that were physically impossible.
When seated on the stool inside the "string curtain room," the audience's physical movement decreased, but the narrative invited them to continue to move internally.
By alternating between directly and indirectly addressing the audience, and by blending a concrete, here-and-now awareness of the installation space with mythological spaces, the narrative prompted shifts between reflecting on the installation and engaging with imagined spaces, further inviting engagement that suspended the experience between the actual and the imagined.
Additionally, the narrative explored shifts in the literary point of view between second person, addressing the audience directly as "you," and an omniscient third person, moving the audience between real-time and mythological time. These shifts affected the audience's proximity to the experience, moving them between immersion and observation. I also inserted looping and repetition in the narrative structure, that was intended to reinforce themes of remembering and forgetting, and to invite reflection on linking and cutting.
All these movements between the actual and the imagined, between various locations, temporalities and viewer positions, between distance and closeness, internal and external – were engaged to invite the audience to be suspended between positions, in a way that invited them to approach the experience with an openness, “as if anew”. In this way I hoped to explore how the methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION could stimulate reflection.
CONTRIBUTIONS
- Erik Medeiros: Sound recording, mixing and sound design.
- Lena Bergendahl: Photo documentation.
- Francis Brady: Runs Celsius Projects and help with installation and promotion of exhibition.
[1] The other artists in the show where Nina Nowak, Fie Norsker and William Darrell. William kindly agreed to model as an audience/listener in the three first documentation photos on this site.
For a detailed description of development see the reflection page.
