Luffare Narratives installation, video installation using three simultaneous projections (28 min / 3 min / 3 min video pieces) |
(Luffare Narratives [Conversation], video clip approx. 4 min / 28 min total) |
(Luffare Narratives [Walk], video clip; continuous loop played in parallel to [Conversation]) |
This video-installation, entitled Luffare (1) Narratives, dealing with isolated or particular personal memories was part re-enactment, part fictional and theatrical reflection on a form of game, role play, that I engaged in as a child. This role play was formed around the walk; my best friend Tom and I used to walk the country roads for hours, or so it seemed, 'living', acting, playing the 'vagabond'. It was a romantic idea; Kerouacesque characters unconcerned about ‘tomorrow’. This act became so intense that we ‘became’ these characters, and they remained with us. These events that took place lack representation – and perhaps there are no ways of representing them, but there are ways to reflect on them. It dismisses the vehicular language in favour of the vernacular, offering a reflection on the local and the personal, the micro language of individual life, the language that through its minor status is able to communicate. The undocumented, the unrecorded, yet remembered is at heart here. These events are primarily important in the present, and the present sense in me of a nomadic existence. The video piece is hence not in fact a piece about the past, but about the present - it is a personal piece, however, it also relates to a more universal idea of the games and forms of role-play that children engage in. The form of stuttering involved in Luffare narratives is hence found in the disruption of explorations of memory and how memory can be expressed. It is not through the often dominant themes of cultural or social memory, but through the apersonal of the personal that memory is explored, suggesting a ‘fluidity of subjectivity, identity and spatiality’, a ‘migratory model’ in place of ‘strictures of fixed place-bound identities’ (Miwon Kwon, 2000 57). (1)Transl. from Swedish: vagabond; vagrant |