performance text

A text written for a reading in Rya Forest. The narrative negotiates the human idea of nature; what we experience as nature - and not, the commersial image of nature, the sentimental notion of nature.  Nature not as pretty and servile but rather as harsh and ugly. And, more than anything, uncompromising.

A lecture intended to summarize a number of conversations between theorecian and art critic Ann Charlotte Glasberg Blomqvist and myself.  The conversations took place in a number of gardens in Jutland during the summer of 2018 while the lecture was delivered as a part of a performative presentation of the project at KH7 Artspace in Århus in October 2018.

Excerpts from Winter is Coming - on Spirits and Populists which iinquires into the relationship between spiritualist practices and the new species of right wing populism that has been emerging in the political landscape over the last 15 years.
The investigation involves issues of voice and representation, of the role of the medium (and the media) and of the desire for a vision that contains a higher purpose. Some cultural references included are the TV-series Game of Thrones and Allan Kardecs publication The Spirits’ Book from 1857.

In the piece Skenkamelia (Stewartia Pseudocamelia) I perform a monologue while planting, watering and fertilizing a specimen of a Stewartia - a tree which is related both to the camelIa and the tea-plant, but which belongs to neither of those families. The performance concerns the difficulty of dealing with things that cannot be submitted to the distinct categories according to which we arrange and understand the world. 

Those excerpts are from the lecture performance Trust and technical Debt. The piece discussing collapsing social structures, the Roller Coaster Syndrome and the extent to which faith in present day society can be maintained. Furthermore, it summons Milton Friedman from the dead to talk things over. 

Excerpts from the lecture performance Monument - Vertical vs. Horizontal, which is about the construction of the capitalist monument, statues of men on horseback as visual obstacles in the landscape, the concurring of the American West and about the return of the cowboy in a contemporary financial context

Texts from Vantablack - the Closest Thing on Earth to Nothing. This is a lecture performance considering the confusion of nature and economy, the significance of high frequency trading, the difficulty of making ethical decisions in an unethical society and the similarity between resistance and a black hole. 

The manuscript from Atomic Tour, City of the Damned; a guided bus tour taking place in Kristiansand, mapping and interpreting the origins and advancement of right wing populism in Norway since the 1930’s. The story traces the origin and development of the Progress Party, while relating a narrative about a suspicious atomic virus, about incidents involving radio active sand and about bizarre local occurrences, presumably originating from an extra-terrestrial source. 

Various excerpts from the performance series Strategies of Magic, which uses the concept of magic to address the prerequisites for transformation,  revolving around the relationship between illusionism and magic – in this context a metafor for populism versus actual political change. The work includes spoken text, music and magic tricks, all of which elements aim to reveal rather than disguise the mechanisms behind the manifestation.