PARIP 2005

International Conference | 29 June - 03 July 2005

Arlander: Annette | Finland

Annette Arlander: Performing Landscape

Most of my work today is concerned with performing landscape by means of video or recorded voice and created for a contemporary art context. My research interests can be summarized in the title of a book I am working on “Performing landscape – notes on site-specificity in the light of practical experiences with documentation and display”. Or, to say it as an artist’s statement:

I am interested in how to perform landscape. Sometimes I use myself as a ”conduit” in video or sound works, that is, documentations of performances repeated in a particular place (like Murmuring valley 2002, Year of the Horse on Harakka 2003, The Shore 2004). Sometimes I use text and try to ”give voice” to some element in the landscape (like Where Rock Speaks 2000 or Trees Talk 2003). My background is in the theatre and in radio plays. My work in and with landscapes (environments, places, nature), means for me a possibility to concentrate on something, which I can do on my own, simply. And more importantly, it offers me the challenge to try to expand my perspective from human (personal or social) encounters towards something else - which for me now, as an older woman, seems relevant, and which I want to point at and somehow share.

The work I describe as an example, “The Shore”, consists of three separate video installations composed of performance documentations made with the same working method, displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in the exhibition “Vision and Mind” in Helsinki 29.5.-19.9. 2004. The first one, “Three Shores”, was performed and video filmed during three weeks in three different tourist resorts and displayed as a triptych of projections (32 min.). The second, “Year of the Goat”, was made on Harakka Island once a week during one year and displayed as a triptych for monitors (13 min). The third one had two parts, “Day and Night of the Monkey” made on Harakka during 24 hours (13 min.), and “Kiasma Shore”, a cumulative performance video filmed outside the museum once a week during the exhibition. Friedrich’s painting “The Monk by the Sea”, Merleau-Ponty’s text “The Eye and the Mind” (1964), as well as the site, situation and set up for which the works were commissioned, were starting points, while the notions stillness and repetition by Howell (1999) and the Fluxus event score (PR, 2002) were less consciously applied models.

To develop a working method useful for other artists I discuss “The Shore” mainly in procedural and technical terms, like choice of a) more or less emphasis on the performer (size, distance, position), b) the timescale (day and night, one week, one year once a week), c) the environment (rural, urban, touristy, crowded or desolate), d) principles of editing (clip duration, loop structure), e) types of display (projections, monitors, sound in headphones or not). The working method used in “The Shore” is the starting point for the workshop “Finding your landscape”.

This particular work and the suggested way of working is a research practice for the production of art, a way to stimulate further artistic work. It relates to the documentation discourse by combining performance and documentation as a method of production. Although the aim of this method is to stimulate the creative process, it could probably be used to gain knowledge of the environment for other purposes as well, to explore ones relationship to the landscape in a therapeutic sense, to take up issues within a community by focusing on special parts of the landscape etc. The types of knowledge could perhaps be related to the three ecologies by Félix Guattari (2000) – roughly the subjectivity, the socius and the (global) environment. Thus this way of working invites questions about the relevance and implications of this type of contemplative or “devotional” work for the performer, the possibilities of a “political” use of the self as a focusing tool when addressing environmental issues and the ethical challenge in creating action models offered to the spectators to repeat in social every day life.

For background, see also www.harakka.fi/arlander.