Week 4: Lego
Paragraph 4 Duration: Performance key: Situation key:
168 hours Abandon habits, then do something. Constant disturbance
At any point inside or outside of interval
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C’MON STEP ON MY LEGO (CONTINGENCY) 20 OCTOBER 2018
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Anna Henningsen, Venus as a boy — fabric, sound
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Johan Lindbjerg Skovbæk, Surface — styrofoam, acrylic paint, tar paint
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Claire Krouzecky, WC (Wall Cloud) — magnifying glass
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Dr Fuck, Awesome Adventure Time — laptop, paper
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Luna, Hanging Harp, With Stone — wood, string, metal, stone
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Mandy, The evolution of battle royal — video (6:00 min)
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Bianca Millan, https://www.google.com/search?q=root+grwoth+simulator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=-
firefox-b-ab — concrete, plaster, screws, glass, digital inkjet print 8
Joackim Peronne Nantgarw, (85% ruled by dice) — video with sound (3:00 min loop)
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Aoife Coleman, duh duh duh duh — concrete, wood, iron, photograph, pole
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Victoria Skjoedt, Blender2saaerdetnu.Tiff — 3D rendered image print on paper
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Marie Skovgaard Larsen, Kol — video camera, video still, iron, coal
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Hildur Iðunn Sverrisdóttir, Amor Volat — video with sound (loop)
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Liv Cappi Grunnet, Cat Scratch Fever — video (3:21 min)
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Isaiah Dodson, Untitled — styrofoam, acrylic paint, concrete, metal, aluminum, tile
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Shan Turner-Carroll, Yes — jeans & underpants, cardboard
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Vilhjálmur Yngvi Hjálmarsson, Hatturinn Fritz (Fritz the hat) — photographs, trash, found objects. 3D
painting, found material
C’mon Step On My Lego (Contingency) is the culmination of a week’s workshop with Lotte Rose Kjær Skau & Daniel Grossman, together with the students of LungA, investigating intuitive approaches in the visual and conceptual modes of making art.
Something. Is about. To happen. “I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that!” — Nina Simone
C’mon, step on my lego (Contingency) is a provocation. It is an invitation to destroy a construction. To break something, to notice something new, something underfoot. It is also an invitation to feel something. To feel sharpness. To notice discomfort, fire. To witness the meeting between plastic and organic. The exhibition is a shrine, and a re-calibration. It is the quasi-religious construction of an environment made to punctuate one possible end-point of a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage that we have made together, that several others have made before us, and that several more will make themselves after we have gone. The pilgrimage does not bring us to any specific place, though. Instead we arrive at more and more un-knowing. But that in itself is a new kind of advance. Un-knowing ourselves, un-knowing what our work is, un-knowing the way our work is received. It is also the celebration of a moment in the growth of this evolving organism. A climactic coming together, clearing out, transforming, testing and arresting — at this precise moment in time, and no other. It is composed of filaments, fragments, jigsaw pieces that come together as bulbs on a billboard, drops in a rainbow, tiles in a bathroom, matter in space. Contingency as in chance mechanics. One thing after another, after another, after another. Interdependency. Chaosmosis. This process of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing subject and object, material and ground, chance and circumstance, becomes a means of
generating a lot of stuff. A lot of thingy thingies. A lot of substance. A lot of feelings, and a lot of un-feelings. What is it to make something? What is it to unmake that thing? What is it for someone else to take that thing? What is it to take some other thing? What is it to shake everything. What is it to mistake your own thing. What is it to be mistaken? What is it to be taken for something you are not? What is it to lay down and let go? To metabolise. To let a cell stand in place for a body. We make rules as a way to relieve oneself of making decisions. As a way to build something out of very little. Of dampening down subjectivity. Or perhaps, rather, accelerating subjectivity and quieting the ego. Rules to have something to break; Lego to have something to step on. ~ Themes of materiality, weight, presence and time are woven through the works on show, leading the visitor through a gestalt experience, where the parts can be experienced as complete in their own right, as well as standing in for a larger consciousness. Beneath the stairs a quiet life force steadily keeps pace. In Venus as a Boy, Henningsen’s recorded breath is played through headphones. One at a time we are invited to listen, while adding our own breath in real time through a microphone feed. Absence and presence intersect, and the simple act of breathing as one stands for an elemental meeting whose power lies in its subtlety. Ascending the stairs we meet Lindbjerg Skovbæk’s Surface. Layers of coloured paint, and finally tar, coat a human-sized Styrofoam block, as though multiple actions have been covered over, masked. Commanding, black, reflective, we are directed again and again to the surface of the piece, but only inasmuch as to suggest there is something beneath worth attending to. Greeting the attentive toilet visitor is Krouzecky’s WC (Wall Cloud), which, through a suspended magnifying glass, inverts an otherwise unseen view from the elevated window. It projects a miniature real-time moving image onto the wall of this private space. The circumstantial specificities of natural light, focal distance and the very fact of looking, align here to punctuate a moment in time.
In the kitchen corner, Dr Fuck’s assemblage, Awesome Adventure Time, epitomizes the incidental spirit of the exhibition. A provocation to both function and form, a dialogue emerges between the printed image of autumn leaves (void of their conventional colour-poetry), adhered to the keyboard of a laptop whose function is doubly void by its sideways placement, and whose screen displays a softly geometric digital illustration. Above the door of room one, Luna’s Hanging Harp, With Stone floats, crucifix-like, overhead. It reads like an elegant, Brancusi-esque composition of suspended equilibrium. Personally symbolic objects coalesce as harmonic, kinetic potential, bestowing a blessing (or curse?) unbeknownst on those who pass beneath. In one corner, a mass of black cables beneath a single floating shelf leads to Mandy’s video piece, The Evolution of Battle Royale. Mandy, resplendent in her sweatband, leotard and tights, takes the viewer through an aerobic-cum-video-game workout. Translating the virtual to the physical, repeated actions of survival, exploration and scavenging taken from the Battle Royale genre form the basis of a workout regime that abstracts the suspended reality of the gaming phenomenon. Also oscillating between virtual and tactile matter, Millan’s floor-dwelling work presents three elements — concrete, glass pane, and digital inkjet print, presumably generated by the search inquiry that is referenced in the title, https://www.google.com/search?q=root+grwoth+simulator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=-firefox-b-ab. This assemblage suggests a deeply rooted material exploration, that circles around notions of ground, and its multiple potential directives for making something — ground-ed, ground-ing, under-ground. Commanding a psychedelic presence in the second room is Peronne’s video work, Nantgarw (85% ruled by dice) with its split-image RGB haze and pulsating soundtrack. The rhythm of the work builds and cuts, builds and cuts, providing no climax, only an unending loop. Composed and edited entirely according to a system of dice-rolling, Peronne’s work creates its own aesthetics around the circumstantial, contingent nature of existence. Meanwhile Coleman’s concrete flag, ominously-ironically titled duh duh duh duh, hangs in the vicinity, as if lifting the curtain on a game of chance. Freezing a moment in time, it muses on the triumphant creative act while at the same time shifting its stance between causality and coincidence. Lingering in the shadows behind the static flag is Coleman’s tongue-in-cheek reminder of an otherworldly presence — perhaps a portrait of the artists’ lurking ego.
On the adjoining wall is Skjoedt’s large format inkjet print, whose cool appearance still insists on its process-driven nature by way of the title and its installation in the space. Blender2saaerdetnu.Tiff is suggestive of its source (Blender being the computer program used to produce the image), while the large satin-finish photo paper is taped to the wall with black duct tape, sending a blasphemous ‘fuck you’ to the expectation of finish, and emphasising once more the dynamism of process. In the centre of the room stands Kol, by Skovgaard Larsen. A rusted iron pole, activating a tension in the gallery’s air space, alludes to an out-of-reach intensity. A handheld video camera is balanced with precision on top of the pole. On the playback screen is a single static image of the artist’s face and hand, close-up, abstracted, covered in black coal marks. An atmosphere of intimacy and exhaustion presides, while the static image returns the question to the viewer, to suggest this is but one single frame in a much larger, much longer, much more personal endurance than we can know here in this gallery. Noticed initially as the source of the exhibition’s soundtrack, Sverrisdóttir’s video, Amor Volat, is played on a tablet device pinned to the wall. A dulcet pop-ish melody is looped repeatedly so that it morphs into a rather muted, but lovely, backdrop. Onscreen we are shown four simultaneous video portraits, each one recorded by accident on the artist’s computer. Animated love-hearts flutter from behind Sverrisdóttir’s shoulders, as she poses self-consciously with various props. Perhaps, this is modern love. A corresponding video portrait plays out on a second tablet device to the right. Nailed onto a wall-swipe of orange paint, Cappi Grunnet’s Cat Scratch Fever shows the artist on her bed; standing, dancing, laying, and sometimes throwing her body to various music and voice bytes, as if to expel an energy that overflows from within. Oscillating between abandon and self-consciousness, a rhythm emerges through the video’s sporadic pace-changing. It becomes almost hypnotic, to be repeatedly let in, and then thrown out, of this private process. The human traces of a private process are encountered again in Dodson’s sculpture, placed in the centre of the space. This time we are invited to consider the weight of concrete upon the lightness of Styrofoam; the liquidity of paint upon the hardness of aluminium. Left Untitled, the circumstances under which these elements came together remains decidedly hidden. But despite the industrial aesthetic there is an undeniably visceral quality to all this that charges the object with a sacred, totem-like energy.
This resonant, spirited quality carries over in the sculpture Yes, by Turner-Carroll. In this work, we are presented with three mounds of trousers and underpants, removed from their domestic context and offered for examination as aesthetic or symbolically charged forms. Placed side by side here in the gallery, they suggest the shedding of an outer skin, a container for the memory of a body, or, simply, inertia objectified. Which brings us, finally, to Hatturinn Fritz (Fritz the hat), the inexplicably titled work by Hjálmarsson. Puzzle-like by nature, absurd in tone, Hjálmarsson’s signature muted palette of forest green, berry red, dust pink and mustard yellow paint forms a unified visual field applied across a constellation of photographs that are hung above and below the centrepiece — a road sign to Egilsstaðir, positioned upside down, with a stolen metal shelf component taped to one end. Taking in the photographs from ceiling to floor, conventional sight-lines are thrown in disarray, and without this usual horizon we look to the photographs’ subjects as reference points, placeholders, or landmarks for some kind of re-orientation. However, with the route out of town removed from its usual position, and unable to procure any further answers from the photographs, we are compelled to surrender to the strange feeling that it is better not to know what happened to Fritz the hat.
Anna Henningsen, Venus as a boy — fabric, sound
Johan Lindbjerg Skovbæk, Surface — styrofoam, acrylic paint, tar paint
Claire Krouzecky, WC (Wall Cloud) — magnifying glass
Dr Fuck, Awesome Adventure Time — laptop, paper
Luna, Hanging Harp, With Stone — wood, string, metal, stone
Mandy, The evolution of battle royal — video (6:00 min)
Bianca Millan, https://www.google.com/search?q=root+grwoth+simulator&ie=utf8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-ab — concrete, plaster, screws, glass, digital inkjet print
Joackim Peronne, Nantgarw (85% ruled by dice) — video with sound (3:00 min loop)
Aoife Coleman, duh duh duh duh — concrete, wood, iron, photograph, pole
Marie Skovgaard Larsen, Kol — video camera, video still, iron, coal
Victoria Skjoedt, Blender2saaerdetnu.Tiff — inkjet print (3D rendered image)
Hildur Iðunn Sverrisdóttir, Amor Volat — video with sound (loop)
Liv Cappi Grunnet, Cat Scratch Fever — video (3:21 min)
Shan Turner-Carroll, Yes — jeans & underpants, cardboard
Isaiah Dodson, Untitled — styrofoam, acrylic paint, concrete, metal, aluminium, tile
Vilhjálmur Yngvi Hjálmarsson, Hatturinn Fritz (Fritz the hat) — photographs, trash, found objects, paint, found material
Lotte Rose Kjรฆr Skau + Daniel Grossman As interviewed on Seydisfjรถrรฐur Community Radio 101.7fm Saturday 20th October 2018
Shan: Hello good evening, or good morning. Wherever you are in the world. Welcome to At the Radio with Jack and Julia, A.K.A. Shan and Claire. Today we have two beautiful guests with us, Lotte and Daniel. Lotte: Hi Daniel: Good evening Claire: Thanks for joining us. C: Ok so you guys have been here for a week now — and this is I believe your ninth or tenth time coming as visiting artists to LungA? D: I think it’s the ninth. C: Alright, we’re in the noughties. D: Always. S: We’ve just had a wonderful exhibition opening, here at what Lasse and Jonatan have called the Old Library Studios Gallery. There were a lot more people than we have in the room right now, and a lot of the community from Seyðisfjörður. Can you tell us a little bit about this year’s program for the workshop, and maybe you could relate that to some other workshops that you’ve done here in the past? L: Am I starting? I’m starting this one. D: You always start it. L: I start it off with the rough things and the ineloquent things and then Daniel takes over and makes everything smooth. Right, that’s the situation? D: Yeah that’s the deal. L: So, from the beginning this workshop has been named ‘Intuition Over Intention’. And every time we’re here it shapes as the week goes by, so we never quite know what’s going to happen depending on the group, where they take it, where they lead us. This time it was a very heavy one. Lots of, I guess, resistance… it was interesting. We were really challenged sometimes as to what we were doing. Which was one of the things that evolved our workshop a lot. So in that sense, with all the hard shit comes just… balloons.
The guys, they’ve been challenging themselves and each other, they’ve been helping each other a lot. And they’ve been setting up rules for how to work. They’ve been deciding whether to follow the rules or whether to rebel from the rules. And I think this was one of the things. It’s a quite simple thing. But it’s difficult when you feel like you’re a student in a place. I don’t feel LungA is a school as such. So I don’t see these guys as students. We refer to them as ‘LungAs’. Because I feel like I guess, I might as well be in that class. We’re just facilitating a workshop and then we’re jumping along, jumping on board. And then, I feel like I get so much inspiration from them, and not just personal inspiration but really like — I’m going to steal some of their material. I’m going to use some of their thingies. Their thingy thingies. Because they experiment a lot and they get so much from it, and we get so much from it. But this is a frustrating place… it’s a frustrating step within the workshop because it’s hard for people, when you’re used to having a teacher come and be the authority and tell you what to do, and then you follow those rules. You do what you’re supposed to do, you want to be a good student. You want to do well. This is one of the things that’s a major struggle within this. Even though you have rebellious, amazing people. People still want to do good and perform, and the thing about this is it’s more what you put into it… the more you put in, the more comes out, that’s really the thing. So it’s more about how much you engage than how much you follow the rule, or how much you impress us as the workshop-ers. D: Yeah I think that’s really right, I think the thing about our workshop is that there’s nothing to get. There’s absolutely no message. It’s an experience, and the more you try to do what’s right — to get it, to please us — the further you get from what it’s about. Which is funny because it’s not about anything. It’s about not being about anything. If that makes sense. As Lotte says, the more you put yourself in there the more you get out of it. But it’s not the more you put yourself for us, it’s the more you put yourself for this sort of vibe. I think this workshop has really evolved throughout the years. And what it is for us is, again, we’re not saying anything that’s right. There’s nothing to get. We are contradicting ourselves. There’s no like “Oh this person did right, that person did it wrong.” It’s, it’s… it’s something that can’t come through in words. The thing is that we’re not doing it right. We’re saying very conflicting, contradicting things all the time. But that’s the essence of it. It’s: “who am I when I encounter contradictions,” you know? What it is for us is the energy that we put in. Which is… we always try and top what every other participant puts in with energy, with our energy. And our dedication. And we really, really, really care about this. We don’t sleep at night — we talk about this. And I think that’s what generates the energy around this workshop. And I think that’s where people get frustrated. Sometimes when you don’t care about something there’s no frustration, it’s just kind of neutral. And when there are
such strong reactions, we know something right happened. This time, it was so challenging. You know, you do it for nine times and people might think “oh you guys have got it right, you know what’s going on.” But there you go, the ninth time, something just gets totally disrupted. And you go, “ok, that’s new, we’re learning something new.” This is why it’s so exciting for us to keep coming back and be a part of this really, really special thing. L: And just to add one thing — this is also the amazing thing that can happen here because we’re in such a secluded place. We’re in a place where everyone feels quite safe, and we’re together all the time, right? So there’s really room to push it. Sometimes the feeling of being safe can kind of interrupt, or be a bit bad. But the thing is that really you see the LungAs being like this little organism. They’re merging into each other’s bodies. They hold each other like I’ve never seen people touch each other. They’re really becoming one thing. And this is just a very special place to be able to work with this sort of thing. C: Can you tell us some things that you might have already stolen, or will steal? L: I might steal one of Villi’s works. [laughter] S: I think he was quite open to that so I’m not sure if it’s stealing. L: Yeah, that’s so boring! I might do it anyway. D: I’m just going to steal something from the kitchen I think. Or some food. [laughter] S: Delicious. L: You don’t have to steal that! S: Can you…. Umm L: Play a song? S: Yes that would be beautiful! So Lotte I hear from a little rumour that you’ve brought a special song along today.
L: Actually Daniel, he brought the first song. S: Oh Daniel, you brought the song. My source is incorrect, I’ll have to get back to them. Stacey the intern, not happy. Audience: Stacey! D: Damn Stacey, you screwed up again! [laughter] S: Daniel could you introduce the song that you’ve chosen for this evening? D: Yes, this song is called Coffee and Cocaine. It’s by Prince. Prince has this vault in his house with loads of recordings that were never released. And this dude you know he would have a stadium show somewhere on a tour, and he would play a gig for his friends before that show, and then he would have a full-on two-hour stadium show, and then he would go to a local pub just unannounced and play another two-hour gig. And a lot of those things were recorded and archived at his vault. This is the first album that came out after he died, with some unreleased material. I want to dedicate this one to Jocko. I was always told that I looked like Prince. But then when I saw Jocko and his attitude — not taking anyone’s bullshit and just doing things his way. I thought “Yeah, he’s a real Prince.” So this one is called Coffee and Cocaine and it’s for Jocko. [Song Interlude: Prince — Cold Coffe & Cocaine (Piano & A microphone 1983 version)] S: Beautiful. Thank you so much Daniel and thank you Prince. C: Ok, so we’re back and I thought it would be nice to talk a little bit about the exhibition that we just had upstairs. And the title of that exhibition was actually inspired by something that Jocko said… D: True! C’mon, step on my lego!... [laughter] D:… Con-tin-gen-cy. C: And so most of the participants showed a work, and it was curated by yourself, Daniel, and Lotte. Was there any idea that you had in the curating
that sort of helped you choose the works? Can you talk about that process? D: This one again was really challenging, because a lot of people came out with quite two-dimensional pieces, in terms of paintings and drawings and videos. There were a lot of videos this time. And it was a real challenge to see how we hold the space for something like that. Again the participants had such an amazing process this week, and so much had happened for each and every one of them. I mean, there’s enough material seriously to create maybe five different exhibitions. Five different versions of this exhibition, with different things in it. And not everybody gets to exhibit everything they have. I think in a way definitely there’s our thing there. The final exhibition that we have here is our exhibition. It’s a bit of a Lotte and Daniel art piece. You know, bring someone else and they will make a different exhibition. But in a way this is what we teach the participants — you can only give what you have, don’t try and pretend like it’s something else. This exhibition is where the spaces of Lotte and I cross over, and how we can bring those amazing peoples’ works out in the best way. So this is not the ‘right way’ to do an exhibition — it’s a very particular style, it’s our style. But that’s the only thing we can bring, and what we would like to bring is the pure essence of ourselves, one hundred percent. So this is what you saw. It’s a bit of the crops of the students’ process, through the sunglasses of Daniel and Lotte. L: Yeah but also I think it’s very important — that we have this idea that we’re artists, that artists should make their own thing from scratch, invent everything themselves, put everything in the exhibition. But I think that art is about communicating with the world, your town, your friends, your enemies, whatever is close to you. So I’d much rather present art that’s been through loads of filters, you know? Filters not meaning as trying to hide something, but pushing it in new directions and being open to the idea that, yeah, I’m a person, I have this idea, let’s see how it is morphed, and another person came up with this idea, yeah I’m going to steal that and put that into my… like to have more of an open source than this patent way of thinking the world in general. Seeing what happens if someone else takes your art piece and is really brutal to it. Also for us, I feel like we’re pushing it sometimes in a direction where they can maybe feel that we’re taking away some of their own decision making and what they would do. But this is what is interesting, because they have all the input. They’ve done so much, you know, they’ve worked so hard, they’ve been so amazing. Then we’re just trying to twitch it to see how strong it can look, in our opinion again. And we tell the LungAs they can put up all the exhibitions they want to [in the future]. This is like a holy thing to me and Daniel, I think, doing this. It’s a very, almost like a religious part of our life, I think. A very monumental and very strong piece of our practice, piece of our life I guess.
D: Yeah, I just realised when you talked that there’s something so delusional in thinking we own something, we invent something. It’s always a shared thing. Saying, “I will show them, I will teach the audience and they will see, my… myself, me — me, me, me.” You know, it’s like, no — there’s not that, let’s let go of that ego, let’s not try and teach the audience, let’s try and open for something else. Yeah, as Lotte said, ‘open source’. And that’s amazing. It’s from a very ancient, spiritual, ego-less tradition, into this very post-modern, I don’t know, whatever, post-internet idea of open-source. And I think that’s what we’re about in this. It’s not about the ‘me’, it’s about something bigger. L: [laughing] Daniel and I haven’t seen each other for a year, or we haven’t been here together in a year, and that’s unusual. Daniel started studying Chinese Medicine, and just the change is amazing. Like it’s so funny, you’re so balanced, and then you say stuff, and then you pause after… like, you leave it there for a bit, let that… S: Let it simmer. C: Just let it hang. L: It’s amazing. D: My ‘me, me, me, me’ is really…. [laughs] my swagger has definitely developed [laughing] through this very spiritual un-swaggered study. Anyway. C: So, in the exhibition you guys also showed a work, which is maybe a tradition? And I had to ask — who is Dr Fuck? D: Dr Fuck, is a gender-less spiritual guide. It first appeared at the attic of Heima, a few years ago. And if you watch Twin Peaks it’s one of those things that just occur in this world, unexplained, this burst of energy. There’s a song named Dr Fuck, and I don’t know, it’s a very challenging experience to listen to that song, but maybe later, when we drink some more of that Campari, different things can happen. L: Yeah, this time I thought the Dr Fuck piece was amaaaazing. I was so amazed, but I don’t feel like I made it. I feel like it’s a spur of the moment, it’s like, it’s really a second when it happens, when it comes together. I mean we’ve been doing a lot during the week. I’ve been burning shoes, I’ve been burning… You know that Shan. We’ve been burning! D: I bin’ burnin’!
L: I bin’ burnin’, okay?! S: You’ve been flamin’! L: And then this comes out like, who… yeah… I don’t know where it came from. It was a very sincere piece, and it’s just a fucking laptop stood upside down with a piece of autumn-leaves-printed-black-and-white paper on the thingy, and then Daniel’s Adventure Time sketch. Now it sounds really dull! But if you see it you’ll know. C: Con-tin-gen-cy! L: Exactly! Thank you Jocko, again. C: Shall we play another song? L: Ok I’m sorry I’m going to play another dude. But I tell you this one goes really low. As in, into your lower regions… It’s called Spinning the Wheel and it’s by Sir George Michael. [Song Interlude: George Michael — Spinning the Wheel] S: Beautiful. Thank you so much Lotte, and thank you George Michael. L: Oh THANK YOU George Michael! Ok I also need to say something in regards to the previous questions… So I just want to say that this week has been really hardcore, you know, but it also really shows in the exhibition that’s just [kisses the air]. S: Sleek as fuck! We have two guests here tonight that are going to be asking some questions. I’m going to first go to Mandy… Mandy: Hello… thank you so much for coming to this radio show. I mean, listening to this radio show — to my radio show. Thankyou, I could go on, but I’m going to ask a question. If you could get a knuckle tattoo, what would you get? L: Girl, you have not paid attention! [points to her knuckle tattoo] M: I know, that’s why I thought of it, because, you have a knuckle tattoo, but I mean like if you’re going to get letters.
L: Oh, is that what a knuckle tattoo is? M: Sorry I should’ve explained more. So I would get something like, FUCK THIS. You know, it has be to be four and four. Yeah. D: Do we need to be intelligent enough to figure out how many letters would fit? M: Yeah it does have to fit, that’s what makes the question important. L: SUAN SUAN. D: Ah, A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J. M: [laughs] Oh I’m really impressed you guys. Ok, Aoife, your question. Aoife: Hey guys! Do you want me to start with the nice question or with the not nice question? L: Not nice. A: Ok. L: No, the nice! [laughter] D: The decision is yours. A: Ok, ok, I feel like it’s better to butter people up before you slap them around. D: That’s what we do for a whole week here. A: Ok, question number one: What have your dreams been like in the old hospital we’ve been staying at? Do you think you’re in a room that has had people be born, or die, inside it? L: I have to say… every time I’ve been here I’ve had an old man standing over me when I slept, but this time there’s no-one, like he left, this old man, this old ghost, I don’t know where he went to. So I have no sensation of otherworldly beings, or whatever that is. D: I always have a noise in my room. We always take the same rooms, by the way. 13 and 12. I’m 13. Terrible number! And I always have the same noise.
L: It’s the heater dude. D: It’s not the heater! It comes from above. Maybe Shan goes to the toilet late at night at the same time. A: Can you do the noise with your mouth? D: BOOF! S: Yes, that would be me. [laughter] A: Ok, are you ready for the next question? D: Yes please. A: It’s not a not-nice question, it’s just that I’m interested in this initial gesture that’s quite anti-form, and then the secondary gesture that’s very heavy on form, and what your thinking is behind that. What motivates the sudden curve ball in the week. And if that is consistent. Is it every year that you do this? L: With the exhibition? You mean the big process thing and then the…? A: Mmm. L: I think it’s very important to know that we want the exhibition very much to happen because we really love curating. And we really think that’s when you step up big time. The reason why we usually don’t tell about the exhibition until very late is because we don’t want you guys to produce work for an exhibition. And that’s a very dangerous thing to do, that’s where the ego comes up — then you start, “oh I have a piece to hang, this is where I want my piece to hang, this is how big I want it to be, I want it to have this big impact,”… all of these things. And that’s when you forget to let the process dictate your work, to really be in it. I know it’s frustrating to be like, “oh we only have two days,” and it’s an exhibition. But guess what, you already had amazing work, you just needed to see it. A: I really liked being tricked! L: It wasn’t to trick you guys, it wasn’t a big like “trickster, haha!” But I can
understand how it could feel like that. A: I think the ability to let us swim in this lack of ego is really nice. But I think it’s an interesting question, because the secondary curational gesture is quite singular, if that makes sense. There isn’t the same process-driven curation as there is process-driven artistic production. So I’m quite interested in this distinction, maybe in your own works… L: I’m not sure that’s totally right. I think I get you, but I feel like it’s very much a process for us when setting up the exhibition. We’re not sure where anything goes before it opens. In that sense setting up the things seems very “gah, this one is there, this one is there, let that one communicate with that one.” But it’s an ongoing thing for us, do you know what I mean? That’s when our process becomes another piece of that. Does that make sense? A: Absolutely. I guess I hadn’t thought of that. That there’s still two of you, and all of this work that you have to smash up against. L: Exactly. And we think a lot about how they communicate in the room, and how the balance is in the room. We’re not putting it up randomly unless this randomness brings something. You know by now what I mean! A: Yeah, for sure man! M: Can I ask a follow-up question? A lot of people had a lot of different works and so I’m curious how, for the people that had just so many different things and they didn’t know which one to do —how you decided which one they should do? L: I think that it’s very much about where we felt that you guys were being strong. Where we could see that when you talked about this, then your eyes lit up and there was fire. Like, even if it was frustrational fire, it’s very clear. But it’s also some of the works. Again it’s Daniel and I, so what speaks to us, and that’s a very subjective thing, yeah? And it’s about being honest about that and being like, “that’s where I see you’re strong.” Next week you’ll have another person coming here and being like “no, why that, this one’s much stronger.” But we’re here, so it’s just about being honest about that. That’s all we can bring. D: When we talk to you we don’t necessarily listen to the content of what you are saying. [laughter]
D: We’re listening to the change of energy in your voice. And in your way of being in yourself. And then we know there’s something going on there and we start digging there. And that’s what we pick up. Of course there’s something subjective in it. This is, in some aspects, a Lotte and Daniel show. But that’s the only thing it can be. Again, this is what we convey in our workshop. We can try and make an objective exhibition, a politically correct, right, inclusive exhibition. But what’s the strength in that? That’s not us. We’re trying to bring something into the exhibition that has something to do with the energy that we all shared this week. And make it strong, as one big piece. I think we talked to a lot of people today about the element of sacredness. And we really see something sacred in this thing. We are trying to generate energy in a space that is very elevated; things that harmonise with each other in some way — that once you step in you are immersed in this thing, and it’s not like, “oh this is just some crap that… just some things that happened in a space this week, because it’s a process.” No, like, ok we’ve been in a process, let’s now take little bits of it and make a little shrine and see what we can experience. L: Also I think it’s a very hardcore expression: a Lotte and Daniel show. Because when you push it you could say that — but we’re not NOT acknowledging it. I mean you’ve been amazing. It’s your works, it’s your pieces, but the putting together of them… A: I think it’s the only honest way to ever curate. Or to do anything. Is to do it properly and incredibly exposed. D: We cannot pretend like we’re not curating it. That’s not going to make any sense. We are curating it, we are here to make the workshop, you know. A: Yeah, yeah, yeah… yeah. M: I guess we should turn off now, but… is anyone else’s mouth numb from the Campari? [laughter] L: Yeah, that happens to me too… S: Thank you so much Mandy and Aoife. Is it time for another song? D: Ok, this is a song that has been our Lunch Beat and our LungA Party song for… not a long time now but maybe two years, and we like to dance to it. I don’t know I kind of have a hope that maybe tonight we’ll get to dance to this
song. At some point, I don’t know how that’s going to happen. L: We can dance now! Also I just really like, Daniel showed me this song, and I stole it, and now every time I DJ — cause I do DJ now and then — I play this song. And I stole it ok. [Song Interlude — Mim Suleiman - Mwaitoma] S: [puffing] Oh my goodness, that was a good workout. It was almost like we were doing Mandy’s workout. L: Haa yeah. D: Cardio! S: Cardio with Mandy! Ok. Now we’re going to play a little game. I’m going to give Lotte some words, and I want you to say the first thing that comes into your head straight away. L: Ok. Oh fuck I get so… S: No time to even talk. Okay, go! Barbara Streisand! L: Fringe S: Goldie Hawn L: Blonde S: Lego L: Blue S: Frog L: Green? S: Contemporary L: Assholes! S: Salad
L: Mmm… I like my salad. S: Pet L: Pet? S: Like, pet. L: What pet? S: Pet. L: Pet? S: Yeah, like a pet. L: Mmm. S: Pet. L: Like a cat? S: Like a cat pet. L: Ohhh I hate cats! S: Okay. Algebra. L: Pyramids. S: Limb. L: Limb… S: Limb, like your arm. L: Oh, my knee? S: Mm hmm. L: Okay, sausage. S: Lasse
L: Football S: Purple L: Prince A: Yessss! S: Jonatan L: Uh, fringe. [laughter] L: No, I’m going to say ‘cute’ S: And, Daniel L: Awwwww. You know I can’t, there’s no words. S: Okay thank you. Claire? C: Okay so these words are for Daniel. Just a disclaimer I didn’t write these so I don’t know what’s coming up! S: And I spelt them as well, in case she mumbles! C: I might not be able to read them. But here goes, are you ready? D: Yes. C: Okay. Meryl Streep. D: Hate! C: Light D: Purple C: Dinosaur… D: Dinosaur — Shan!
C: Spaghetti D: Ah, Blue is the Warmest Colour. C: Contingency. D: Ahh… What the hell. C: Red D: Red light district C: Ear D: Umm, needles C: Paper D: Paper trail C: Eyelashes D: Drag queen C: Julia D: Julio? C: Julia! D: Julia! Umm… you. C: Jack D: Cable! C: Lotte D: My love. [aww]
C: Thanks! S: That was wonderful! So we are coming up to the end here. Is there anything that you guys would like to say or share? L: Well we’re going to have to say thank you to you two. Of course. C: That’s definitely going in the zine! L: Haha. I mean what a good week. We’re so happy that you’re here. So lucky we’re very blessed by the Icelandic elves to have you here. D: And I think it’s very difficult because we come here for a week and we fall in love with all these people, and then it’s just heartbreak, we just have to go. And we have to continue without everyone, and they continue without us, and sometimes we never see them again. We’re never immune to that, it’s always you know, straight to your heart. So I think we want to express our love to all the special people that we’ve had such a unique relationship with this week. L: And the previous ones, right? The previous LungAs. And also just to say that of course everything lives on in the body and so on, but you really live on in Daniel’s and my conversations, right? D: Yeah always. L: We talk about you all the time! D: Yeah and it’s true to acknowledge all of the previous predecessors, because the energy in this week without maybe everybody knowing… it always builds upon the previous time, the previous experience, more and more people. It builds up this energy. Again it’s not about “me, me, me,” it’s almost like a lineage now of what’s happening here in Seyðisfjörður, and LungA especially. I think we’d really like to acknowledge that. We’re really feeling very grateful and thankful for that. S: Ok. Before we go, we have a little promotion. M: Right so, me and Aoife are going to have a radio show every Friday night and it’s going to be called Whisky and Crumpets. Tune in for that! It’s going to be off the chain. S: Thankyou +1 Elsewhere, also, for listening.
D: Can we play for the end of this the Dr Fuck track? S: That would be awesome. Thanks again so much for your presence, your patience, your compassion. C: Dr Fuck, take it away! [Song Finale: Jamie 326 - Dr. Fuck]
LungA School Fall 2018