The Big Goodbye
2016, video installation
Editing: Oliver Husain
Sound Scape: Michelle Irving
Voice: Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
Where am I and what am I looking at? First there is fire, flames, then a strong sense of ascent, then drifting. I am in a basket suspended under a hot-air balloon, floating precariously above an empty city I have never seen before. I notice that this city on the water is almost empty, as if I am in the future and something has happened here. No trains on the tracks. A few adults and children by the church. Very little movement, just a few seagulls, as if this place is abandoned. There is no one down there except a few lost souls. And some strange, spawning fish in the water. I expect a narrative but nothing is happening, and most likely nothing will happen.
There are voices up here. A man’s voice, emotive, fleeting, a faraway echo from the past, undulates, humming, whistling, and repeating certain words that seem to say there is nothing; searching, moving between houses and waters, across bridges, railroad tracks, and empty viaducts looking for his darling. All the while the more intimate, ordinary female voice seems to cite certain parts of a poem that together could be understood as a message should I care to listen. And a second voice close by, female, anodyne, dispassionate. Winged infants suddenly appear and disappear, escaped putti from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, small lost souls that emit nebulous messages of hope and love.
I now understand. I am in a personal story that begins in the now and moves backwards in time, into the past, to the “before,” while the balloon is moving forward over the buildings and into the sunset and into the thick forest, to and past death, moving with the quiet, plain singing of the female presence that I don’t understand but perceive as comforting and safe.
And on the ground, in the present, my mother was dying. I rose in the balloon and filmed the journey across the places of my childhood home, seeing it from a strange, otherworldly perspective. My mother died three weeks later. The experience became a work, a film, a different journey. I locate myself through associations, but as an artist I am compelled to move past my own habits and the limitations of known associations. The Big Goodbye is a form of psychological disassociation necessary to overcome the death of my dear one.
The use of the melancholy music of “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss was inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was also the most common type of music in my home at the time I grew up in Stockholm. It was often on the radio with similar music when I came home for lunch and experienced a certain dread of a routine that went on from when I was two until I moved out when I was nineteen. The other deeply sad and beautiful atonal music is from the late 1950s Swedish science fiction opera Aniara, based on Harry Martinson’s poem of the same name. I saw the opera with my parents when I was eleven. The music and its story of doom but also of extreme beauty and poetry has stayed with me.
These pieces of music connect me directly to the place and people I left.
The male voice is by Canadian artist Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, who, during his residency at Thielska Galleriet in the spring of 2016, recorded his voice in parts of Stockholm that are seen from the balloon. My own voice speaks random words from a book of Swedish poetry, Lyrikboken (The Book of Lyrics), that I found on a park bench when I was a child.
EXHIBITIONS
2017 As part of Houses and Whispers: Gunilla Josephson, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto
2016 As part of Houses and Whispers: Gunilla Josephson, Rodman Hall Art Centre, St Catharines