Workshop by Inger Eilersen
It is interesting to see how people experience the world. This video illustrates and clarifies how people meet and experience the world in different ways. I am accustomed to a practice where the performers, through their dialogue with me, have one truth that they try to convey to an audience. In this video, the focus is on different ways of describing a piece of reality. Rather than having the audience fall victim to a particular perception which you as the sender thrust upon them, this video offers a space where the audience itself is able to construct different understandings of what they have experienced.
It was essential in this workshop that the participants were able to describe an experience of everyday life without much influence from my part, which is why the idea of a GoPro camera came up. Besides, it was important that they did not have to make all sorts of arrangements, but that it seemed to naturally fit into an already existing everyday life. I got annoyed with myself that I did not put myself into play alongside the four participants and wore a GoPro camera, so I chose to do that during the following workshop presentation.
In big films, everything is arranged in the head of the director or screenwriter, so the actor becomes some form of a puppet. When, in this video, we see the participants sitting at home with their birds singing around them, we feel some more or less clear-cut impacts, because we are not receiving an introduction in the form of a context. We are transported directly into an immediate present. It is an unfiltered and clean clip that demonstrates a moment in a person's life. When people tell stories, they will often talk about something in their past, their relationships or self-understanding. This I do not experience very strongly in the clips in the video.
If you just watch the video that was shot by the participants over the two days, it is like watching something without glasses: That it is what it looks to be. After these raw clips were recorded, I got the four participants to comment on their own video, thus creating another layer of reality. In addition, I chose to let three experts with different professional backgrounds comment on the video. The three experts represent various perspectives by virtue of their different professional background. Naturally, this will colour the way they see the world. So, when the experts comment, it is as if several understandings and layers of reality meet.
I was thinking about doing an installation of this, where five different people would be listening to five different soundtracks, and then I would subsequently ask them to discuss what had happened, but I never got around to doing that. If you are interested, you can sit down and listen to all five soundtracks and see what happens. These can be seen in the Extra Material section.
