This presentation continues the explorations of Animal Years (2003-2014), a series of video works or performances for camera on Harakka Island, and the possibility of their re-assemblage into video essays, like “Revisiting the Shore” (Arlander 2018), or perhaps into digital forms of autotopography (Gonzalez 1995; Bal 2002; Heddon 2008), a notion I was interested in at the time. Returning to the site of the performance of Year of the Rooster (2006) and Christmas of the Rooster - Tomten (2006) twelve years later serves as a starting point for reflections on the materiality of the site. Could the small birches in the images, still growing there, be regarded as co-performers or artists, following a recent suggestion by Michael Marder (2018), or be understood as partners in a sympoiesis of sorts (Haraway 2016)? Does such an at attempt to rethink the performer-environment relationship as “performing with” living beings in the landscape really matter?
The exposition forms a triptych of three parts placed in three columns on one page. First, on the left this short introduction continues here below with a presentation of the video materials used as a starting point for the compilation. Second, as the centre piece, a video essay with the transcript of the voice-over text below, is augmented with some extended notes. And third, on the right, a brief discussion places the essay in the context of the topic of this publication, how to do things with performance.
A recommended way of exploring this exposition is to watch the centre piece, the video essay The Shore with Birches Revisited (16 min. 28 sec.) after this brief introduction, and explore the rest of material and the discussion only after that.
Year of the Rooster (Installation) 2006 (à 6 min. 24 sec.)
http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-rooster-installation/
Part 1. I am walking with a red scarf on my shoulders past the camera from left to right, from South East towards North West on the western cliffs of Harakka island, 48 times, approximately once a week 8.1.–31.12.2005.
Part 2. I am standing with a red scarf on my shoulders with the camera behind me on the Western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea 48 times, on the same occasions.
Part 3. I am standing with a red scarf on my shoulders with the camera behind me further down on the Western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea, on the same occasions.
Part 4. I am sitting with a red scarf on my shoulders with the camera behind me on the Western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea, on the same occasions.
Part 5. The cliff on Harakka island, shot 48 times on the same occasions.
Christmas of the Rooster (Installation) (à 6 min 7 sec)
http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/christmas-of-the-rooster-1-3-installation/
Part 1. I am walking with a red scarf on my head and a light in my hand past the camera from left to right, from South East towards North West on the western cliffs of Harakka island 13 times, at Christmas time from 25.12. 3 PM – 26.12. 1 PM 2005, with two hour intervals.
Part 2. I am standing with a red scarf on my head and a light in my hand on the western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea, 13 times, at Christmas time from 25.12. 3 PM – 26.12. 1 PM 2005, with two-hour intervals.
Part 3. I am standing with a red scarf on my head and a light in my hand further down on the western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea, 13 times, on the same occasions.
Part 4. I am sitting with a red scarf on my head and a light next to me on the western cliffs of Harakka island looking out to sea, 13 times, on the same occasions.
The two versions of part four included here, which contain Victor Rydberg's poem “Tomten” read in the original Swedish, with the Finnish or English translations as subtitles, are not part of the publicly distributed work.
The same works exist as versions for screening, with the parts following one after the other:
Year of the Rooster (2006) 31 min. 37 sec
http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/year-of-the-rooster/
Christmas of the Rooster - Tomten (2006) 18 min 32 sec.
http://www.av-arkki.fi/en/works/christmas-of-the-rooster-tomten/
For information about the first exhibition and other works related to these, see
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=15480
Transcript of the voice-over text:
This presentation1 continues the explorations of Animal Years, a series of video works or performances for camera on Harakka Island, made between 2003 and 2014, by focusing on Year of the Rooster from 2006 and Christmas of the Rooster - Tomten also from 2006, and the possibility of their re-assemblage, perhaps into a digital form of autotopography, a notion I was interested in a few years later, originally coined by Jennifer Gonzalez in 1995 and later used by Dee Heddon in 2002 and 2008. Returning to the site of the performance twelve years later2 serves as a starting point for reflections on the materiality of the site. Could the small birches in the images, still growing there, be regarded as co-performers or artists, following a recent suggestion by Michael Marder3, or be understood as partners in a sympoiesis of sorts, to use the term by Haraway? Does such an at attempt to rethink the performer-environment relationship as “performing with” living beings in the landscape really matter?
In “Autotopographies” in 1995 Jennifer Gonzalez explains how trophies, photographs, travel souvenirs, heirlooms, religious icons and gifts can take the form of autotopographical objects, physical extensions of the psyche. These personal objects can form a spatial representation of identity, which she calls an autotopography or even “museums of the self” (Gonzalez 1995, 133):
“Existing along the continuum of monument and microcosm, this collection, arrangement or storage of symbolically significant objects represents a personal identity in relation to a larger social network of meaning and functions to anchor the self-reflective image of the subject within a local earthly cosmos. In the creation of an autotopography [. . .] the material world is called upon to present a physical map of memory, history and belief.” (Gonzalez 1995, 134).
According to Gonzalez the creation of an autotopography is a form of self-representation. Like a written autobiography (a series of narrated events, fantasies, and identifications), an autotopography forms a spatial representation of emotional ties and past events. (Gonzalez 1995, 134) Autotopographies are created to reflect memories and desires, to protect a threatened identity, (Gonzalez 1995, 140) to reflect utopian identification and mythic history, or to map a future vision (Gonzalez 1995, 145). An autotopography is a combination of ‘fictional’ memory and ‘factual’ history embedded in material objects. It is “a powerful tool of ‘evidence’ – linking time, space, and event in a material manifestation of ‘self’”, (Gonzalez 1995, 147).
In Autobiography and Performance in 2008 Dee Heddon acknowledges that Gonzalez uses the term autotopography to refer to personal objects arranged by a subject as physical signs that spatially represent that subject’s identity, whereas in her own application the term is understood more literally as the writing of place. She explains:
“In thinking about performances that fold or unfold autobiography and place, particularly outside places, I have conceptualised them as autotopographic, a neologism used for more than its fleeting allusion to autobiographic. Topos comes from the Greek word for place, while graphein means to scratch, to draw, to write; topography, then, signifies the writing of place.” (Heddon 2008, 90).
For Heddon “autotopography is writing place through self (and simultaneously writing self through place), [. . .] autotopography, like autobiography, is a creative act of seeing, interpretation and invention, all of which depend on where you are standing, when and for what purpose”, (Heddon 2008, 91). The performances she describes as autotopographic utilise storytelling for audiences present at the site, intertwining personal and local remembrances and narratives. For her, “an autotopographic practice brings into view the ‘self’ that plots place and that plots self in place, admitting (and indeed actively embracing) the subjectivity and inevitable partiality or bias of that process”, (Heddon 2008, 92).
In an earlier paper, Heddon uses the term “to signal more specifically the location of a particular individual in actual space, a locatedness that has implications for both subject and place” (Heddon 2002). She interprets “graffiti as an instance of autotopography, a writing which marks and remarks landscape whilst simultaneously marking and remarking subjectivity” (Heddon 2002).
If we understand autotopography like Heddon – as writing place through self and writing self through place, or as writing which marks and remarks landscape whilst marking and remarking subjectivity – the concept seems best suited for narration or textual practices. It needs some revision to be of use in my examples. In these video works I am of course depicting myself in and through a specific site, and characterising that site through myself. Time passing is visible on me as well as on the landscape and so on. In 2012, however, I used the term autotopographical exercise4, to describe some works5 created the same year as the Year of the Rooster, in order to focus on the action rather than the result. (Arlander 2012) Today, this video compilation of a recording of a year and a day and night could be understood as an autotopography of sorts, a digital collage of personal souvenirs.
Regarding the materiality of the site, some insights from the process might be worth noting in passing. The red scarf served as a costume, but the shifting outfits during the weekly performances for a camera on tripod turned out to be rather dominating. In future years I used a more careful dress code. Using the red scarf on my head to allude to the Gnome or “Tomten” during the day and night at Christmas time, and carrying a small lantern with a candle, turned the same action of walking, standing and sitting into a form of representational acting, as if impersonating a gnome. The need to bring in light during the day and night, to provide a focal point in the darkness, was an insight from the previous year. During that night, however, the sky was cloudy reflecting the lights of the city, so there was no real darkness. The text, a childhood souvenir, an old well-known poem by Victor Rydberg, was recorded afterwards, while editing. It was included only in the first installation version, and has not been publicly shown after that. In this context, I could not see any reason, except vanity, to censor it.6
(“Tomten” by Victor Rydberg spoken by AA in Swedish, subtitles in English7 and Finnish8)
Midvinternattens köld är hård,
stjärnorna gnistra och glimma.
Alla sova i enslig gård
djupt under midnattstimma.
Månen vandrar sin tysta ban,
snön lyser vit på fur och gran,
snön lyser vit på taken.
Endast tomten är vaken.
Står där så grå vid ladgårdsdörr,
grå mot den vita driva,
tittar, som många vintrar, förr,
upp emot månens skiva,
tittar mot skogen, där gran och fur
drar kring gården sin dunkla mur,
grubblar, fast ej det lär båta
över en underlig gåta.
För sin hand genom skägg och hår,
skakar huvud och hätta --
"nej, den gåtan är alltför svår,
nej, jag gissar ej detta" --
slår, som han plägar, inom kort
slika spörjande tankar bort,
går att ordna och pyssla,
går att sköta sin syssla.
Går till visthus och redskapshus,
känner på alla låsen --
korna drömma vid månens ljus
sommardrömmar i båsen;
glömsk av sels och pisk och töm
Pålle i stallet har och en dröm:
krubban han lutar över
fylls av doftande klöver; --
Går till stängslet för lamm och får,
ser, hur de sova där inne;
går till hönsen, där tuppen står
stolt på sin högsta pinne;
Karo i hundbots halm mår gott,
vaknar och viftar svansen smått,
Karo sin tomte känner,
de äro gode vänner.
Tomten smyger sig sist att se
husbondfolket det kära,
länge och väl han märkt, att de
hålla hans flit i ära;
barnens kammar han sen på tå
nalkas att se de söta små,
ingen må det förtycka:
det är hans största lycka.
Så har han sett dem, far och son,
ren genom många leder
slumra som barn; men vartifrån
komma de väl hit neder?
Släkte följde på släkte snart,
blomstrade, åldrades, gick — men vart?
Gåtan, som icke låter
gissa sig, kom så åter!
Tomten vandrar till ladans loft:
där har han bo och fäste
högt på skullen i höets doft,
nära vid svalans näste;
nu är väl svalans boning tom,
men till våren med blad och blom
kommer hon nog tillbaka,
följd av sin näpna maka.
Då har hon alltid att kvittra om
månget ett färdeminne,
intet likväl om gåtan, som
rör sig i tomtens sinne.
Genom en springa i ladans vägg
lyser månen på gubbens skägg,
strimman på skägget blänker,
tomten grubblar och tänker.
Tyst är skogen och nejden all,
livet där ute är fruset,
blott från fjärran av forsens fall
höres helt sakta bruset.
Tomten lyssnar och, halvt i dröm,
tycker sig höra tidens ström,
undrar, varthän den skall fara,
undrar, var källan må vara.
Midvinternattens köld är hård,
stjärnorna gnistra och glimma.
Alla sova i enslig gård
gott intill morgontimma.
Månen sänker sin tysta ban,
snön lyser vit på fur och gran,
snön lyser vit på taken.
Endast tomten är vaken.
From today’s perspective the small birches in the image, one half dead at the time, but growing fine now twelve years later, prompted me to think of the concept sympoiesis9, utilized by Donna Haraway, and the possibility of a performance ‘with’ the birches10. For previous generations the gnomes or other fairy tale figures thought to be living in the surroundings of human habitation perhaps served as similarly strange albeit indispensable collaborators, to be taken into account in some manner. Haraway writes:
“Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other or not at all. That kind of material semiotics is always situated, someplace and not noplace, entangled and worldly.” (Haraway 2016, 4).
4. Some quotes exemplifying my earlier approach to autotopography: "Attempts at using autotopography (a spatial representation of self) and topobiography (the places of one's life) in the analysis of my experiences leads me to propose a modified notion - autotopographical excercise - to describe practices related to topobiographically meaningful places." (Arlander 2012, 251)
"...an autotopography could be understood as a topography of and by the self (as the study of the earth's surface shapes by oneself, the depiction of the surface shapes of oneself or the surface shapes of one's place). The projects I have described can be analysed as autotopographical exercises in all the senses outlined above." (Arlander 2012, 257)
"Some performance practices concern mainly the performer. When these practices are related to topobiographically meaningful places, we could call them autotopographical exercises." (Arlander 2012, 258)
5. Secret Garden 1-2 (2006) and Sitting on a Birch (2006) were performed weekly in Koivumäki, Kalvola on Sundays between 22 May 2005 and 14 May 2006 and shown for the first time in the same exhibition as Year of the Rooster (2006) on Harakka Island 19 July to 6 August 2006. See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-work?work=497827 and
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-work?work=497828
1. This video essay is based on the presentation "Return to the site of the Year of the Rooster" on 2 March 2018 at Research Day II organised by the How To Do Things With Performance research project. See https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=281037
2. The recording of a visit, on 6 December 2017, to the site on Harakka Island where Year of the Rooster was performed in 2005, forms the background image to the video compilation.
3. “To assert that plants are the artists of sensuous appearances, offering untold aesthetic riches to whomever they attract, is to claim in the same breath that they are the artists of being. In effect, plants create and recreate themselves all the time, growing new limbs, shedding leaves, putting out new sexual organs (i.e., the flowers). They are performative creatures par excellence, the artists of themselves. Vegetal self-creation and self-recreation takes its cues from the conditions outside—cold for shedding leaves; warmth and longer hours of daylight for flowering; sun exposure for growing new branches—without a rigidly predetermined organismic plan. The artistry of plants that make themselves is, therefore, of one piece with the world.”
(Michael Marder: “A portrait of plants as artists”)
6. At the time my focus was on performing landscape, documenting changes in the environment, and I did not realize the importance of other materials, like the scarf for the overall effect. Thus, including the poem in the public work seemed irrelevant as well, especially since the pathetic tone was embarrassing. In the context of discussing autotopography and memory, however, avoiding embarrassment because of personal vanity would be limiting, since the pathetic tone carries some of the affects involved.
7. The Gnome (translated by Judith Moffet)
Midwinter nights the frost is deep,
The stars are glistening and sparkling.
All on the lonely farm are asleep
Moveless through midnight darkling.
Silent the road where the moon glides bright,
Snow on the boughs is gleaming white,
White on the rooftops gleaming.
All but the gnome are dreaming.
Stands there so gray at the barnyard door,
Watches the drifts blow flatter,
Stars, as so many winters before,
Up at the moon’s bright platter,
Notes where the spruce trees, shaggy and tall,
Draw round the farm their shadowy wall,
And – though it profit him little –
Ponders a curious riddle.
Combs his fingers through beard and hair,
Shakes his head with the hood on:
“’Tis too much for me, I declare,
That’un I’m just no good on.”
Then, as ever when questions irk,
Shrugging it off he sets to work:
Bustles in all directions,
Makes his rounds and inspections.
Goes to the toolshed and dark storehouse,
Tries all the locks and latches.
Huge by their stanchions dream the cows,
Moonlight gliding their patches;
Whip and harness forgotten quite
Dobbin dreams in his stall all night:
The manger he’s drooping over
Seems heaped with sweet-scented clover.
Goes to the fold where lamb and sheep
Drowse in their fleece together.
Proud on his perch the cock is asleep
In the hen house, out of the weather.
Fido, bedded in straw, feels fine,
Thumps his tail with a friendly whine.
Needless to bark Who is it? –
This is a nightly visit.
Lastly the gnome steals in to see
All is well with his neighbours,
Certain of old this family
Honors his faithful labors.
To the nursery then on tiptoe creeps,
Sees how sound each little one sleeps.
Let nobody misconstrue this:
His greatest joy is to do this.
Farther and son he has seen them there
Year upon year unending
Slumber as children – come from where?
Generations descending
On generations and swiftly so
Bloom, age, vanish – where do they go?
Riddle that brooks no guesses
Presses again and presses.
Back to his hayloft stumps the gnome.
High in its fragrance vested
There is his stronghold, there his home,
Near where the swallow nested.
Now her nest is empty and cold,
But when the flowers and white and gold
Spring will restore the swallow,
Calling her mate to follow.
Then she is always eager to chat,
Twitter of all her travels,
But not of the riddle nagging him – that,
Nothing she says unravels.
The brilliant moon through the chink in the wall
Shines on the old chap, beard an all.
Moonbeam on gray beard glistens.
Pondering still, he listens.
Hushed lie farm and forest and all,
Frozen the whole of existence.
Only the voice of the waterfall,
Muffled, speaks in the distance.
The old gnome listens and, half in dream,
Thinks he hears Time flow by like a stream,
Wonders whatever its course is,
Wonders wherever the source is.
Midwinter nights the frost is deep,
The stars are glistening and sparkling.
All on the lonely farm are asleep,
Sound through the small hours darkling.
Silent the road where the moon sinks bright,
Snow on the boughs is gleaming white,
White on the rooftops gleaming.
All but the gnome are dreaming.
9. Sympoiesis is a term used by Donna J. Haraway to emphasize various forms of relationality in action: “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or selforganizing. … earthlings are never alone. That is the radical implication of sympoiesis. Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company.” (Haraway 2016, 58)
10. Michael Marder stresses the importance of understanding vegetal life for understanding what it means to “live with” other beings, because “the dispersed life of plants is a mode of being in relation to all the others, being qua being-with.” (Marder 2013, 51.) In his opinion “all creatures share something of the vegetal soul and are alive in the most basic sense insofar as they neither coincide with themselves nor remain self-contained”. (Ibid.) For him the “shared divisibility of all living beings, first honed in the acts of the vegetal soul, pertains to the workings of the soul in general”, and for “the psyche to live it must receive guidance from the vegetal principle of divisibility, constantly becoming other to itself”. (Ibid.)
8. Kotitonttu (translated by Yrjö Jylhä)
Tuima talven on pakkanen,
tähdet kiiluvat yöhön,
kansa kartanon hiljaisen
nukkuu aamuun ja työhön.
Verkkaan laskee jo kiekko kuun,
lunta täynnä on oksat puun,
kattojen päällä on lunta.
Tonttu ei vaan saa unta.
Ometan ukselle vaiti jää
Harmaana hankea vasten,
Kuuta taivaalla tirkistää
Tuttuna vanhain ja lasten,
Katsoo muuria hongiston
Takana nukkuvan kartanon,
Pohtien iäti uutta
ongelman salaisuutta.
Kouransa partaan ja tukkaan vie,
Puistaa päätä ja hilkkaa –
”ei, tämä pulmista vaikein lie,
ei, tämä järkeä pilkkaa” –
heittää, niinkuin jo kiire ois,
moiset pulmat ja mietteet pois,
lähtee toimeen ja työhön,
lähtee puuhiinsa yöhön.
Aitat tutkii hän peljäten
Lukkojen auki jäävän –
Lehmät lehdoista uneksien
Torkkuvat oljilla läävän.
Ruuna myös unen heinää syö,
Suitset ja siimat ei selkään lyö:
Seimeensä saa se tuohon
Tuoreen ja tuoksuvan ruohon.
Lampaat ja vuohet karsinaan
makuulle jättää ukko.
Kanatkin nukkuvat orsillaan,
ylinnä ylpeä kukko.
Koppiinsa vahti vainun saa,
nousee ja häntää heiluttaa,
tonttu harmajanuttu,
Vahdille kyllä on tuttu.
Pirttiin puikkii hän nähdäkseen
Isäntäväkensä oivan,
Tietäen heidän siunanneen
Tonttunsa työn ja hoivan;
sitten hiipii hän lasten luo
nähdäkseen vesat hennot nuo;
ken sitä kummeksis juuri:
hälle se onni on suuri.
Halki sukujen vaihtuvain
seuras hän ihmeellistä
näkyä pienten nukkujain –
mistä he saapuivat, mistä?
Polvi varttui ja ahkeroi,
Vanheni, lähti – mut minne, oi?
Ongelma eessä on jälleen,
Selvittämättä tälleen.
Viimein jää ladon parveen hän,
siellä hän vartoo kesää
tuoksussa heinän lämpimän
lähellä pääskysen pesää:
vaikka pääsky nyt poissa on,
kukkiin noustessa nurmikon
saapuu se tänne varmaan
seurassa puolison armaan.
Silloin se laulaa ja tirskuttaa
matkamuistoja tieltä,
mutta ei tunne ongelmaa,
näin joka vaivaa mieltä.
Seinän raosta paistaa kuu
vanhuksen rintaan heijastuu,
kuunsäde kimaltaa partaan
tontun miettivän, hartaan.
Vaiti metsä on lintuineen,
luonnon mahlat on jäässä,
koski vain ihan hiljalleen
pauhaa matkojen päässä.
Tonttu lumoissa kuutamon
kuulevinaan ajan virtaa on,
miettii, minne se vienee,
missä sen lähde lienee.
Tuima talven on pakkanen,
tähdet kiiluvat yöhön,
kansa kartanon hiljaisen
nukkuu aamuun ja työhön.
Verkkaan laskee jo kiekko kuun,
lunta täynnä on oksat puun,
kattojen päällä on lunta.
Tonttu ei vaan saa unta.
Looking at the brief video essay from the perspective of performance, there seems to be a constant flux between performance and representation going on. The repeated performances of walking, standing and sitting on the shore are recorded and edited into video works, audio-visual representations of those actions and of the site, including the birches. One such performance is repeated once more, twelve years later, to produce another representation of the same landscape and the same performers, the human being, the birches, the cliff as well as other features and creatures of the site. This revisit is left unedited to serve as the introduction and backdrop for the compilation of the older representations. To begin with the main strategy seems to be repetition, repetition of the actions during a year, (for Year of the Rooster), during a day and night with two-hour intervals (for Day and Night of the Rooster - Tomten) and once more after twelve years (for The Shore with Birches Revisited). Another level of repetition is added with the videos repeated next to each other within one image frame in the compilation to form miniature installations supported by brief texts including basic information. A voice-over text reflecting on the work (spoken live to accompany the video compilation when presented the first time) and on a previous article related to it produces a new type of performance, a lecture performance or performance-lecture of sorts, here presented as a representation, a video essay.
With Day and Night of the Rooster - Tomten and the added visual elements (wearing the red scarf on the head associating to the red cap of a gnome and holding a lantern with a candle), a dimension of representation, even representational acting, is introduced on the level of the first performance. This is further reinforced in the compilation by the reading of the poem "Tomten" written by Victor Rydberg as a voice-over text, which brings an aspect of fiction and narration into play. The reading of the poem is of course a performance in its own right, and combining the two recorded performances - the visual and the auditory - begins to resemble an illustrated narrative. By combining video images of the same material in various sizes, including versions with the English and Finnish translations as subtitles, this assemblage of representations around "Tomten", the gnome, becomes a sort of performance in itself, inserted into the video essay.
In the voice-over text I refer to an earlier article from 2012, where I suggest that some works created the same year could be understood as autotopographical exercises. There I combine the notion of autotopography (Gonzales 1995, Heddon 2002, 2008) used for instance by Mieke Bal in discussing the Spider by Louis Bourgeois, suggesting that it “refers to a spatial, local and situational ‘writing’ of the self’s life in visual art” (Bal 2002, 163) with the notion topobiography proposed by geographer Tapani Karjalainen, which refers to biographical place experiences, and emphasises time lived and remembered in places. (Karjalainen 2006, 83-84) Instead of focusing on the result, the autotopography, I wanted to emphasize the action, the practice, the performance, and spoke of autotopographical exercise. In geographical contexts there has been an increasing interest in memory, both collective and individual, and in the entanglement of past spatial relations with the experience of current places (Jones 2011). This a possible direction of developing the discussion in relation to both topobiography and autotopography.
In the video essay I chose, rather than to develop the notion of autotopography further, to focus on the birches, the silent witnesses to my performance still present at the site. Or rather co-performers, who are contributing with their presence to the videos then and now, and showing by their growth the time that had passed between the visits in 2005-2006 and in 2017. At the time of making the videos I did not think of the birches as co-performers, but saw them as parts of the environment. Although I wanted to focus on the changes in the landscape, the birches served in their customary role of setting for human action, a backdrop to the human performer.
With hindsight it is nevertheless possible to think of our performing together as a sympoiesis of sorts, as a “making with”, like “making an image by standing together with the birches” or “performing for the camera together with the birches” or even joining the birches as they were performing on the shore and in the image space. We were meeting repeatedly and “becoming with” each other through the seasons. Donna Haraway’s ideas on the notion of sympoiesis seem useful not only in linking the human figure and the birches, but also in connecting the very present and living birches growing at the site and the invisible or culturally imagined figure of the gnome that I carried with me since my childhood, and brought with me to the site. Both of them are strange creatures, or “oddkin”, to use the term of Haraway, to befriend and perform with. Both, however, can from another cultural perspective be regarded as living beings effecting and affecting the human world. But, does such a rethinking of the relationship between the performer and the environment really matter? Would the videos have been made differently, if consciously considering the birches co-performers, focusing on visiting them in their place? Probably yes. In the images where the performer walks past the camera, the relationship is different than in the images where she stands or sits next to the birches, as if sharing their mode of performing.
Within the limited time of the video essay, I barely hinted at the possibility of looking at the compilation of digital souvenirs as an autotopography of sorts. The whole video essay can nevertheless be understood as a digital autotopography, a collection and arrangement of personally important images or digital objects. If an autotopography, according Gonzales, can exist along the “continuum of monument and microcosm”, and form a “collection, arrangement or storage of symbolically significant objects” which “functions to anchor the self-reflective image of the subject within a local earthly cosmos” (Gonzalez 1995, 134) such autotopographies increasingly take a digital form today. In collections where “the material world is called upon to present a physical map of memory, history and belief” (Ibid.) this often takes place with the help of digital images and sounds. An autotopography resembles a written autobiography, forming a spatial rather than textual representation of past events, where ‘fictional’ memory and ‘factual’ history are embedded in material objects, “linking time, space, and event in a material manifestation of ‘self’”. (Gonzalez, 1995, 147) Such a material manifestation could very well take a visual or audio-visual form, which today usually means digital. Although material objects and relics from the past can have a specific performative power, digital images, too, can serve as mementos on a personal as well as on a social level, in the same way as tourist images can serve as souvenirs of other places and times for others, beyond their personal use. In the video works I thus tried to produce "collective 'souvenirs' of what the landscape looked like on the north coats of the Baltic Sea during these years at the beginning ofm the twentieth century" (Arlander 2014, 28).
The video essay or film essay as a format and the “digital epistemology” of documenting practices related to performance in “dense video” as research documents (Spatz 2017) would be worthy of a discussion of its own. This video essay hopes to contribute one example to the ongoing experiments in other journals like JAR, VIS, JER or Screenworks. In this case the video essay can also be looked at as a form of digital autotopography, a collection and arrangement of digital objects, which exists “along the continuum of monument and microcosm” and “anchors the self-reflective image of the subject within a local earthly cosmos”, performing a “physical map of memory, history and belief”. The same could probably be said of this exposition as a whole, although its main purpose is providing an example of how the act of revisiting previous work and combining them into multi-layered performances and representations can generate knowledge and understanding. Thus, not only engaging in autotopographical exercises, as I suggested in 2012, but in the act of assembling digital autotopographies, could be a powerful way of doing things with performance.
References:
Arlander, Annette. 2018. “The Shore Revisited.” Journal of Embodied Research, 1(1): 4 (30:34), 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/jer.8
Arlander, Annette. 2014. “Performing Landscape for Years”. In Performance Research Special issue: On Time. 19-3 2014, pp. 27-31.
Arlander, Annette. 2012. “Performing Landscape as Autotopographical Exercise”. Contemporary Theatre Review 22:2. 2012, pp. 251-258.
Bal, Mieke. 2002. “Autotopography – Louis Bourgeois as Builder”. In Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith (eds.) Interfaces – Women / Autobiography/ Image / Performance. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 163-185.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. 1995. “Autotopographies”. In Gabriel Brahm, Jr and Mark Driscoll (eds.) Prosthetic Territories: Politics and Hypertechnologies. San Francisco: West View Press, pp. 133–50.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Heddon, Deirdre. 2008. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Heddon, Deirdre. 2002. “Autotopography: Graffiti, Landscapes & Selves”, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 2.3 Summer 2002.
https://www.academia.edu/3270895/2.3_autobiogeography_considering_space_and_identity
JAR – Journal for Artistic Research https://www.jar-online.net/
JER – Journal of Embodied Research https://jer.openlibhums.org/
Jones Owain. 2011. “Geography, Memory and Non-representational Theory”, Geography Compass, Social Geography Section, 5/12, pp. 875–885.
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Marder, Michael. 2018. “A portrait of plants as artists.” Philosopher’s Plant. Los Angeles Review of Books. https://philosoplant.lareviewofbooks.org/?p=243
Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rydberg, Victor. 1960. “Tomten”. In Romell, R. (ed.) När Tomten Kom. Sagor och legender av Hjalmar Bergman, Selma Lagerlöf, Viktor Rydberg, Zacharias Topelius m.fl. Uppsala: Lindblads, pp. 15-19.
Rydberg, Victor. “Tomten”. Originally published in Ny Illustrerad Tidning 1881
http://runeberg.org/rydbdikt/tomten.html
Rydberg, Victor. 1981. Kotitonttu. Transl. into Finnish Yrjö Jylhä. Helsinki: Tammi.
Rydberg, Victor. 2001. “The Gnome”. In Judith Moffet (ed. and transl.) The North! To the North!: Five Swedish Poets of the Nineteenth Century, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 105-109.
Screenworks http://screenworks.org.uk/about
Spatz, Ben. 2017. “What do we document? Dense Video and the epistemology of practice.” In Toni Sant (ed.) Documenting performance - The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving. London: Bloomsbury.
VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research https://www.en.visjournal.nu/about/