Sirra Sigrún Sigurðardóttir
NEXT - 2012 2/2
Tremors – work in progress [this work will be shown at the Reykjavik Art Museum as part of the [I]ndependent People project that is the visual art part of the Reykjavik Art Festival 2012]
Abstract/Overview
Tremors is a multi-channel video and sound installation depicting residents of Selfoss, a small town on the south coast of Iceland, expressing in movements and spoken text, their impressions from two dramatic events shaking their lives in the year 2008. In May a powerful earthquake took place, 6.7 magnitude, in October the country's economy collapsed. Filling the gap between spectator and actor they take on the form of a chorus, speaking and acting out their experiences. The work explores the juxtaposition of the man-made with the natural; disasters, shifts, changes and movements . Our personal reactions to uncertainty, fear, mistrust and alienation. The work attempts to visualize the very subtle psychological and physical effects that events like this have on the individual level as well as how the more emotional reaction and reflexes manifest in the society.
Project Description:
I'm collaborating with an amateur theater group in the town Selfoss, creating with them both the visual and text/spoken part of the work. We meet and talk about experiences and impressions from both the earthquake and the crash – and other traumas, if people want. Each person chooses three to fifteen sentences they want speak out loud.
The setting for the video and sound recording is as follows. On a theater stage, one person stands at a time on a platform, lit only by spotlights. The platform is hanging on wires from the ceiling and is very sensitive to movement and sways, so when entered upon, it takes some time for the movement to calm down. When stillness and balance is reached, the person speaks one sentence out loud. Just the act of taking one deep breath and speaking is enough to disturb the balance, and before next sentence can be spoken, balance should be reached again. In between sentences actors let out an “shh” sound, as to say “be silent, stop talking, hold your tongue”.
Individual recordings are then edited together to form the chorus, there they speak both as one and as many, separated but joint.
The spoken words are in Icelandic, simply because the work is made in Iceland. (I will make a translation and a script that can be followed while viewing.)
Examples of sentences spoken:
“when is this over”
“I just don't know what to do”
“this is in no way my fault”
“How are you supposed to react”
Presentation/Installation
The video is four channels with one sound track and will be projected (HD) in full body size onto four black walls. The chorus floating in air surrounding the audience. (The presentation on the web is made in that way that it is possible to hear the audio form all sides but like in real space, you can only see one/two walls at each moment.)
Statement:
For the last three years I have been trying to address in my works the (financial) meltdown and upheaval that happened here in my home country and in other parts of the world. What are the reasons and forces behind these events? I want to look at how changes and shifts like this affect us on a personal and individual level, hoping that this can simultaneously reveal something of the bigger reality and about ourselves as humans.
I'm not so much thinking economics and politics per se, but more in the direction of natural phenomena, natural disasters, personal experience, human nature and psyche, also identity and history. There are parallels between the movement of the earth’s crust, and the shaping of landscape over long periods of time to phenomena closer to scale and time in our human nature – a kind of transfer and transformation of matter and energies. Economics speak about recessions and crises in the same way as geologists speak about the building up of tension in the earth’s crust, tension and release. Another element in the work is the notion of the body as land – or land as body – that is taking the earthquakes, rifts and drifts, and looking at them more as internal movements and/or a psychological state.
Here I draw more upon personal experience and knowledge from Craniosacral therapy (CST) where the main idea is that during the course of our lives our bodies become patterned, shaped and conditioned, tissues become imprinted with the memory of experiences and so act like videotape, which keep replaying whenever stimulated. But this of course does not only apply to the body; the mind and memory work in this way, too. So there is also a element of psychoanalytic theory in the work, mirroring all these classic mind/body questions of our humanness.
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