HOUSES & WHISPERS
10 houses 10 films 10 memories 10 enigmas
2012–14. 23 minutes looped
This work can be seen as a meditation and to a certain degree a grieving process over fleeting and transitory human lives. Houses & Whispers proposes fragments of personal memories, imagined lives, and the commonality of a true/false past. In my video work I often begin with the conventional language of film, and its narrative parameters of anticipation, detection and resolution. I then disrupt and dispute the suggestion that art is well-behaved and easily digestible entertainment. I prefer the unexplained, the enigmatic, and the question instead of the answer, the lie that is a truth, the whisper behind the voice.
Ten videos of houses/buildings filmed in Stockholm, Sweden, contain brief scenes from seminal b/w films, viewed through the windows. The source sound from the shoots of the houses mixed with the diegetic sound of the film scenes form an undulating sound track that subtly transports the viewer in and out of the film and the ‘real’ world.
A printed text scroll [1 x 1.8 feet], MP4 player, head phones.
A text and sound component is constructed using every sentence that carries the word House in the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, then read and recorded, using a variety of voices edited to segway into a whispering canon.
–––––––
HOUSES & WHISPERS
10 hus 10 filmer 10 minnen 10 gåtor
2012-14. 23 minuter loopad.
Houses & Whispers kan ses som en meditation och till en viss grad ett sorgearbete över flyktiga och förgängliga människoliv. Tio hus/byggnader filmade i Stockholm innehåller korta scener från inflytelserika filmer som kan betraktas genom fönstren (en film i filmen). Husen med sina ballaster kan också ses som ett uttrycksmedel [vehicle] för personliga, fragmenterade minnesbilder, inbillade, tänkta liv, alla med ett gemensamt sant / falskt förflutet. I mina rörliga bilder och installationer börjar jag ofta med det konventionella film-språket och dess narrativa parametrar för förväntan, upptäckt och upplösning, för att senare i videon ifrågasätta och sabotera föreställningen om konsten som skötsam och lättillgänglig underhållning. Jag föredrar det svårförklarliga, gåtan, en fråga istället för ett svar, lögnen som är en sanning, en viskning bakom rösten.
Ljudband Gatuljud från inspelningen av de tio husen i Stockholm och de diegetiska ljuden från spelfilmerna i husen har flätats samman med målet att subtilt undulera mellan de inre filmscenerna och den yttre ‘verkligheten’.
Tryckt skriftrulla [30 x 54 cm], MP4 spelare e.d., hörlurar.
Text med med ljudkomponent: en lång mening och uppbyggd av varje mening som bär ordet Hus i den första volymen av Marcel Prousts roman På spaning efter en förlorad tid, läses av en mångfald inspelade röster redigerade till en form av kanon av röster, som utmynnar i en gemensam viskning.
A single sentence constructed from every line containing the word House in volume 1 of the novel In Search of Lost Time by M. Proust
It was no good my knowing that I was not in any of those houses of which, if I had not caught sight exactly, I could still believe in their possible presence, for memory was now set in motion, and her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable, her presence gave the house what none other of the houses that he visited seemed to possess: a sort of tactual sense, a nervous system which ramified into each of its rooms and sent a constant stimulus to his heart and so the simple and regular manifestations of a social organism were transformed and having always had a craze for pictures, he now lived and piled up his collections in an old house in a neighborhood in which my great-aunt thought it most degrading to be quartered; the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished, a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone standing upon another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her bed, or that perhaps it is a simple dwelling-house that stands alone, ugly, if anything, timid-seeming but full of romance, hiding from every eye some imperishable secret of happiness and disenchantment, and I have every useless thing in the world in my house there, the only thing wanting was that the necessary thing had been evicted, vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense, uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, and then her house in Combray, then her bedroom, and finally her bed, but to suppose that she went to bad houses, that she abandoned herself to orgies with other women, that she led the crapulous existence of the most abject, the most contemptible of mortals, none of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.