Digital Screening Room

THANK YOU!

Aksel Ekblom

Ann-Britt Rönnell, SU

Anna & Per Steen

DIF Djurgården Boxning

Danderyds Tennisklubb

Erica Odell

Fritidsförvaltningen Danderyd

Gustavsbergs bibliotek

Gärdets Squashhall

Göran Lindeman, Wasakronan

Insitutionen för film och media

Mats Jörholt m. personal

Kent & Anki Grönström

Lilla Akademin

Loppis-Ingvar Olsson

Lotta Millde Luthander

Louise Scheja

Max Edqvist

Mihra Lindblom

Nils Pahlbäck

Pernilla Lesse, Färgfabriken

Roland Kristiansson

Stocksunds IF

Tove Loheman

Ulf Friberg 

ÅVC Hemse

Klas Dykhoff

Lars-Göran 'Labbe' Nygren

Tom Brennan CSI

Carolina Jinde

Ewa Wallin

Göran Wendel

Magnus Andersson Lagerqvist

Nils Harning

Arvid Friberg

Charlotte Markelund

Johan Pahlbäck

Ruth Pahlbäck

Sven Friberg

BTI

extras

Annika Whittembury

Beatrice Pourbagher Garcia

Chloé de Buyl-Pisco

Debhora Vega

Desirée Olame Bayibsa

Diana Harbia Lundberg

Eli Bø

Emmanuelle Guichet

Hainan Zeng

Hanna Åhs

Lena Kempe

Meryam Dogan

Robin Bukhamseen

Sanna Ansgård

Yasmine Seifi

--- Cinematic

image as reinterpretation, moving 

image as restructuring of present and

past, combination of image and

sound – sites, words and 

actions – as reconstruction 

and reframing of perceived 

reality and events

...

-- Storytelling

weaving, pulsating, 

multiplicitious, reflexive,

intersecting storylines, spiral 

progression, revisiting...

Kersti:

I was picking up my sewing machine from a repair shop which is on the same block as The Greasy Spoon brunch restaurant. Getting out of my car I had both establishments in my view, visually connecting the restaurant where I had the first meeting with my now secondary research supervisor Karen Pearlman the one time she was in Sweden and the now repaired sewing machine I made the costumes with for BLOD.  

Crossing the street I drew an actual spatial connection between sewing and talking about my research. To include the sewing of costumes for BLOD in the research had been a way for me to embody the characters that would wear them. Since Annika and I play all the parts and she was writing the dialogue, I saw the sewing as my opportunity to approach and inhabit the characters through a hands-on creative act before actually playing them in film scenes. Deciding to do it, I had thought less about all the time I would spend cutting and sewing. The slowness of it. The forced reflection through another medium. A blank page between louder voices in the film making process. 

In both the physical exhibition of processes that we did at the art gallery Färgfabriken and in this digital exposition, the costumes take up a lot of space.  They hung all around the exhibit room and images and films of them as objects fill a large portion of this website. I have had plans to write a lot about the costumes to justify their omnipresence, but it keeps slipping lower down on the list of priorities.  And maybe that is because there is no explanation needed. The time and effort spent making them correlates with the amount of space they occupy in rooms and digital expositions and that presence is how to convey their importance in the project. 

Annika: 

Dislocating story events from their natural habitat is a gesture to create new meaning, and perhaps say something about life and society by the twisted operation of a familiar space. The dislocated filming sites are chosen for their potential to performatively engage with the sites’ specificities – its inhabitants, nuances, weather, etc. This immediate exposition of the research and its processes continuously loop back into the project and the practice of dislocation generates reflection and critical dialogue.

The conversation with three sincerely curious male squash players after we filmed a scene about a young girl’s first visit to the midwife on one court while regular games were played on the others, caused not only blushing cheeks but a serious conversation about film, art, culture and life. Their genuine enthusiasm for the project – and its themes – and their desire to discuss is with us, had everything to do with the event taking place at a site where they felt safe. We talked about that for a long time, Kersti and me. 

Research actively looking through

a feminine lense

– cyclic, spiraling, 'rhizomatic',

kaleidoscopic, layered –

in states of FEMMES:

Breaching one’s FOLD by grabbing its bottom,

turning inside out.

Continuously returning to Daddy Lacan’s claim; again (encore) is the world’s most EROTIC word.

In Swedish: igen och igen.

Affording MONSTERS shocking light of day 

– unleashing inner creative beasts.

Attempting to rewire and relearn – repetition as

the MOMMY of learning.  

Listening to ECHOES of (feminine) experiences reverberating through time and space.

Obsessively picking at SCARS of

life and story.

Annika:

based on my embodied knowledges and experiences as a dancer and choreographer i want to explore:

how can a text – a scenic score – be written so that, when put into use, it invites bodily experience and triggers moments when impulse and influence merge and ignite sparks in mind and body. 

thus: how to organize linguistic expressions that activate physical sensations, mobilize memories and stored knowledge; how in writing arouse impulses to be applied with body and movement; form text that is re-created when it is interpreted by its user through speech and sceneries – handlings and situations 

nb 1. my experiences of dancing and choreographing are that they are utterly different practices.       (as are writing and talking.) 

nb 2. notions of body, bodies, embodied include but are not limited to humans'

i'm exploring a writing that triggers exploratory performative processes; how one can write (for scene and screen) out of and with bodily experiences rather than about what is experienced. so that, by giving room for new / other knowledges, already existing experiences can be transformed and (re)created as movements and / or dialogue. these processes include both my own writing processes and processes in which my text might be used

taking from my experiences of dance practice, improvisation is a core component. improvisation – from Latin’s improvisus: the unpredictable of the unforeseen – the subtle pas de deux of sense and

fancy. which presupposes a fusion between what i already know but yet don’t know that i know. perhaps revealing facets of lived experiences not previously evident

often a boundary is set between composition – something that can be repeated – and

improvisation – something that occurs in the moment and only lives while it's going on.

but i want to investigate the partnership of those temporal entities – spatially and temporally.

examine ‘where’ in the user the text is placed so that the interpretive understanding becomes

immediate in the scenic situation; and ‘when’ text functions so that the past (composition), the

present (improvisation) and the future (the process/practice/work) become one and the same

nb 3. even though improvisation manifests in the ongoing, in my understanding it consists of many different temporalities and intra-actions 

i imagine these  processes like spiral movements; out of my bodily experience, text is formed that can possess its users – exert influence – and inspire the user to improvise on basis of their own

bodily knowledges. in this way, embodied experience lives in the improvisation and through

improvisation what not yet exists becomes embodied. by writing the embodied, new meaning in old events can be discovered. and through that arrive at a text that spurs physical enactment of the complexity in each (performed) moment’s inherent risk and unpredictability

Content ----

blood, sex, loss and death,

birth and rebirth, recurring 

states, fear and laughter, 

visceral sympathy,

longing, physical

alignment...

5.

Annika:

Here comes some kind of a story. It’s true. 

In a crispy greenery a few years ago at Hedvig Eleonora cemetery. Kersti Grunditz Brennan – from here on referd to as KGB – and I sit on a park bench. We are talking about our mothers. About ourselves as mothers. Kersti is what we in Sweden call top barrels furious. Not just at her mom. A comprehensive work has crashed because someone in a crucial function did not do their job. As I sense her frustration, it’s outermost about vulnerability. About being at the mercy of someone else's negligence. And then sit with the responsibility of the other's lap in one’s lap. But it doesn’t look like rage and frustration only, I also sense despair. As merciless jaws have merged and locked in desire and creativity.

    The story ends with KGB shouting: Annika, I'll never make a movie again! O’gnarly. There I sit like a charlie. We get hungry and have some grub. After a few pieces of sushi, I grow up and start groping. Mumbles about a movie, about moments of life & death - when one becomes aware that the body belongs to mother nature, who does whatever the fuck she wants; a film examining a bleeding body. That starts bleeding. Stops bleeding. One night bleeds and bleeds until life nearly abandons it. A film about the animal experience of having a uterus. To be the story yourself. Loneliness. The farce. Nausea. A visual poem with a loop of events opening and intervening with one another. A film dealing with life’s finiteness, hovering between the abyss and the trivial, moves in the tension between pain and laughter. Associative and condensed. Surrealistic and poetic. Wildly shifting style and tone. Both dreamlike and concrete. A film that challenges traditional dramaturgy and creates a kaleidoscopic image-telling. The film should be boundless, hurt, ruthless and funny. Suddenly KGB shouts: Let’s make that movie! When we finally meet again, we haven’t seen each other in nine months. In the joint between winter and spring we meet at the same hole in the wall on Sibyllegatan:

KGB:

Annika that movie, it’s time to make it. I have a suggestion.

ANNIKA:

Kersti…

KGB:

If you become a co-researcher on my PhD project, write the script and –

ANNIKA:

I need to tell you something...

Long silence. Cuttlery continues rattling, people around them mumbles, scrolls, queues.

KGB:

(Raises eyebrows – what…?)

ANNIKA:

I have cancer. An aggressive tumor is growing in my womb. 

Five days later, the uterus et ultra is gone. One week after the surgery, we, Kersti G. Brennan and I, start planning. Wise or mad from experiences we will take care of it all. The two of us are the whole team. One of us writes the script, the other edits, the rest of the A-functions we share; sewing costumes and making dolls, finding locations and creating stage- and light design, playing all the roles (17 for KGB, 19 for Annika), cinematography, composing and performing the music, creating animations and graphic design.  + WE WRITE A MANIFESTO: 10 rules challenging us to keep the obstinate; being our compass when the starry sky rotates. When we struggle with organizing our bouquets of knowledges; when forging connections across the many different arrangements of the trying and the doing – as well as the know-how; and above all attempting to transcend disciplinary boundaries altogether.

7.

1.

6.

2.

3.

8.

4. 

MANIFEST

10.

9. 

annika:

The BLOD method is a method of reuse and repetition – subtle performative recycling; exploring actions and situations, like bodily processes – breath, heartbeats, bowel movements – that keep us alive while driving us towards death. With this kind of – simultaneously life-giving and destructive – premises I explore the fuel of creativity: the doing and the attempting. Paying attention to bodies’ importance in creating meaning; a practice that also involves bodily aspects when working with power structures,    risk taking, responsibility, limits. It is a fundamental attitude to what creation is about, just like the words point to, ethics in interaction with artistic exploration.

I want to write scripts that allow for theatricality, engender a kinesthetic reading, and invite scenic displacements and temporal shifts, while simultaneously foregrounding the materiality of the text and the embodiment of concepts. Aiming to reveal the material’s inherent fragilities and instabilities, my work is based on creative documentary strategies in a porous overlap of fiction and reality. Weaving the components into each other while still maintaining a space for the unknown. Weaving hybrids by giving attention to vulnerability and tenderness of bodies. Complicating the role of the protagonist through listening, acknowledging, decentering.

All my work begins and ends with relations. Human as well as more-than-human. To me, writing is ground research on what it means to be a temporal and finite being. Every creature’s existence will come to an end. How do we deal with that?

Annika:

In November 2019 BLOD the feature premiered. The night before I couldn’t sleep.

What does it mean that we live? that we die? that things end?

Tossing and turning I fathom This is what I do; I create shelters, I practice dying.

The research project BLOD is a home.

By home I mean: a relation-building well-tempered hangout, or: I’m looking for metamorphose.

I am in there, and I am not in there. Also, I am not not in there.

When I write I, I also write you.

‘I’ write ‘you’ and ‘I’ mean all my lovers, all my cats, all my children.

When ‘I’ write lovers, cats, children ‘I’ probably mean relations, society, transformation.

Home in Old English is ham, of Germanic origin; related to Dutch heem and German Heim.

When what is known and familiar returns as strange and foreign it arrives unheimlich –

one feels at home believing one is safe, and suddenly: strangeness in the ordinary. 

During the years of work with BLOD there have been questions: 

Whose research is it? Who has done what? Why chorus?

Even if I have felt BLOD being a home – for acumen, for breeding, for community –

if there are heads thinking I do not belong, there will be tension.

Creating unhomely moments. 

                   Whose house is this? Whose night keeps out the light in here?

                Say who owns this house? It is not mine. I had another sweeter…

          The House is strange. Its shadows lie. Say, tell me, why does its lock fit my key?

                                                                    (Toni Morrison)

WHY ON EARTH?!

Annika:

I try to take on matters I don’t really know what to think of. I'm drawn to situations in which human relations are absurd, banal, crabby, dark (etc.). And through the dramatic situation figure out situations, relations, handlings, conflicts on a deeper level. 

    Trying to capture dimensions of life or reality, I often find it in the concentration that re-telling offers. In other words: by using the archive of my own body when writing, I discover fresh meanings in familiar events. 

    My writing in BLOD is not autobiographic in the way one might think of as autobiographic. Having said that, I recycle experiences gained from my own life, mixing with others', reusing earlier writing, rotating the so-called reality turning it into fiction.

    While seriously transforming the shadows of losses into artistic expressions – and doing so on its own terms – the BLOD project explores a kaleidoscopic cinematic story telling that challenges expectations of realism/naturalism that the film medium traditionally invites.