Pier Yves LaRouche

As I am writing this, I am several thousand dollars/million krona in debt. As you are reading this, I am most probably deeper down in the red. Head under water, economically breathing with a tuba. 

 

“Oh, why must I feel this way? Hey, must be the money!” (Nelly, Ride wit me)  

 

One of the few words I can pronounce flawlessly in Icelandic is gull (/ˈɡʌl/). It means gold. I pronounced it repetitively over the duration of this MA degree. Ironically, the symbol of wealth that the word carries is not the reason I have come to nail the diphthong with at least 90% accuracy. Quite the opposite, Gull is the cheapest beer I was able to afford and order.  

 

Alcohol can act as a medium that binds communities together: a facilitator and a palliative. Through drunkenness, time reaches a new pace. There is then a simultaneous cohabitation of an alternative time, which is itself experienced on a different temporality. Alcohol is a tactic, among others, to take part in a community. Art conversations, sharing drinks, hobnobbing. It is a slippery slope. 

 

 “Theory provides a ground for strategy which then takes the form of tactics. This sentence integrates the idea of dynamics. There is momentum at work, a specific form of development with an origin and an end point.” (Rousseau Grégoire, Geometry of a Paper Tiger, 184) 

 

 I am neither interested in the origin nor the end point, but rather in the momentum. The dynamic of the in-between.  

 

Paul Virilio sees the accident as the revelation of the identity of the object. Accidents are circumstantial to place and time. The exercise during this degree was to tame the accident from its hostile environment in order to (mis)use its energy and juxtapose it in an absurdly incongruous situation. Thus piggybacking on the aura created by the composition to set off a non-sequitur path for interpretation. From collage to assemblage my work has become circumstantial situations activated as portals in which I would juxtapose and collocate symbols. 

 

I strive to objectify the dynamics of intangible and overlooked qualities of a set environment; an exploration of symbols and feelings floating in limbo. The aim is to curate a frame for the layering of interpretations, bringing to light the ambiguity between obvious and oblivion. There is a pendulum effect between themes of hope/hopelessness, meaning/meaninglessness, sublime/ordinary that creates a movement of cerebral gymnastics in which symbols slowly reveal themselves as part of the paradigm. However, they remain unclear as too many of those ellipses interfere with each other, leaving the viewer in a constant dubious state, relying on contemplation and ambiance as an anchor. 

 

 “Reasoning by ‘loose association’ signals a dysfunction in the reign of rationality. It is the sign of a thinking that, falling under the mass of information, would take a turn and leave the road of classic dialectics, characteristic of thinking that progresses from level to level towards an ultimate and synthesised aim. [...] Two versions, one optimistic and the other pessimistic, of the mind’s ability to invent its own ways of knowledge.” (Gander Ryan, Loose Associations, 13)