osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019 - 2024: New, Ongoing and Completed by OCTOBER 2019.

OCTOBER 2019

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MIKAELA ASSOLENT ADRIÁN BALSECA BENJAMIN BARDINET JULIEN BISMUTH MARCELO CIDADE JONAS DAHLBERG CAROLE DOUILLARD ED D’SOUZA METTE EDVARDSEN JAN FREUCHEN JONAS HØGLI MAJOR SIGURD TENNINGEN GAYLEN GERBER OLIVER GODOW 2

HLYNUR HALLSSON MARIANNE HEIER KATJA HØST JAVIER IZQUIERDO MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS MÔNICA NADOR BRUNO OLIVEIRA ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN ALEXANDER RISHAUG ROSE HAMMER MICHAEL ROSS LISA TAN KNUT ÅSDAM 3

Opening the first edition of a biennial consisting of art in public space is a free, open-ended task full of possibilities. The curators have designed a model that involves changing the accepted structure of the biennial model. A decentralized, locally based art programme that evolves gradually over five years entails a number of challenges.

These become no less acute when the new biennial model has also set out to influence cultural policy through new approaches to production, display, dissemination, and in some cases, purchases of art for a public art collection.

DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD OLE G. SLYNGSTADLI

As a consequence, the conventional biennial concept is inadequate but necessary; inadequate because it does not fully encompass the scope of art in public space and necessary because it is a wellestablished term that describes a programme or exhibition which is curated successively at fixed intervals with an international orientation.

There are several challenges. How does one stage an exhibition using an entire city as an exhibition space in such a way that the general public also experiences what happens as something that concerns them? And how to create a framework that provides time and space for art projects that go beyond traditional formats in terms of duration?

Although the invited artists operate through a wide range of media and formats, they all contribute to new reflections on these issues. In the autumn, for example, we are premiering two films we have pro-duced, funded and own editions of: Javier Izquierdo’s Crimes of the Future, a film about a film about a book about a city; and Knut Åsdam’s Oslo, an episodic film work that will develop over the five years of the biennial.

Another challenge is to build up a programme and an organization that supports the production of art. We wish to leave an infrastructure of lasting benefit to artists who live and work in Oslo. We have done so by establishing production units, guest studios and project spaces, among other things, which we share as democratically as possible with artists and art producers. We are also busy setting up a film production unit where visual artists who work with film can borrow highquality camera equipment and receive practical help with production.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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If we can contribute to better conditions for art production and at the same time create a programme that is interesting to both general and specialized publics, we will have done something that is different and goes beyond the scope of other biennial exhibitions. In this context, we feel it is extremely important to participate in the discussion of how art impacts on public spaces, how art in public spaces is acquired and managed, and in some cases accounted for. The autumn programme includes three projects which, in various ways, deal with the Government Quarter, the Y-Building and/or the terror attack of 22 July 2011. osloBIENNALEN must be a biennial for Oslo: an integrated programme of art in public spaces, rather than an temporary exhibition which happens to be situated in Oslo. This is not just about cooperative approaches to art production and all that it involves; it is also about an ambition to participate.

osloBIENNALEN Director Ole G. Slyngstadli

We invite—we do not commission. We work with art that addresses specific situations and contexts—we do not “mediate” between artworks and audiences. Our audience comprises random passers-by—not a predetermined audience. We explore, question, disrupt, and embrace public space and what happens in it—we do not treat public space as an alternative exhibition space.

CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION EVA GONZÁLEZ-SANCHO BODERO PER GUNNAR EEG-TVERBAKK

osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 opened on May 25 2019, launching a new biennial model.

Its five-year evolving program of art in public space is supported by praxis and infrastructures aimed at fostering and facilitating art practices that engage with the contingency, latency, flux, and vulnerability of public space and the public sphere. In this way, osloBIENNALEN has brought two traditionally distinct art fields together: the biennial and art in public space.

The best experiences of other biennials have provided examples of temporary, experimental, conceptual and processual artistic practices, while the best of art in public space depends on the use of unexpected places and sites, encounters with diverse audiences and random passers-by, and the variable time frames associated with art in public space. osloBIENNALEN is launching a second set of projects on Friday October 18 2019, another manifestation of its policy of stretching the conventional biennial timeframe to allow projects to unfold overtime.

New works will appear, while others presented at the opening in May continue, evolve, relocate and develop. Some works will pause momentarily pending the next phase or episode. Works that have been completed are documented and some are being re-released in book form. Others might remain indefinitely. In this way, works of art can pass through different stages of development, evolution and display within a single framework.

This marks osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 20192024 as something other than an art exhibition in public space. It is very different in its approaches to production, development, and reception. It is not possible to visit the whole biennial in the space of a few days; it can only be approached as a series of

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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Curators Eva González-Sancho Bodero and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk

encounters or fragments over a period of several years. The Biennial engages with the complete life cycle of these works of art in public space.

Working alongside the artists, the biennial is involved in the development of ideas, in production, public outreach and the afterlife of the works. In the context of art initiatives intended to operate outside the protected spaces of conventional exhibitions, the life cycle of a work of art in public space/public sphere depends on its particular characteristics; curating must be able to allow time for sensitive handling and responses to the specific needs of each individual work, time for each project to run its course, and time for display, which may be constant, intermittent or spasmodic.

CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION

For works of art in public space, time and space operate differently from works placed in a museum or gallery. Public space does not have opening hours, or an established audience. People and situations come and go in an uneven flow characterized by routine activities or extraordinary unforeseen occurrences. So placing a work of art in public space, characterized by mobility and varying experiences of space and time, is entirely different from a conventional exhibiting setting in an art institution. Time becomes a separate factor. osloBIENNALEN has opened up the ways in which artworks take on these shifting conditions by facilitating the production and display of works of varying duration, tempo and rhythm.

Take for example Carole Douillard’s project The Viewers, a two-hour living sculpture that appears occasionally at different locations around the city chosen by the artist. This consists of a group of 18 people who stand still and stare at passers-by or at a point in the urban landscape, a tableau vivant or embodiment of the collective presence that constitutes public space. Then there is Mette Edvardsen’s library of living books Time has Fallen Asleep in the Afternoon Sunshine – inspired by Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) (depicting an oppressed society that has banned books, in which individuals learn entire books by heart as an act of resistance). Edvardsen’s library is active and ongoing at the osloBIENNALEN premises and will continue for the entire five-year timespan of the biennial. Julien Bismuth’s performances will also take place intermittently over all five years of the biennial. This is a series of performances under the title Intet er Stort Intet er Litet (Nothing is Big Nothing is Small) and takes the form of a number of performers who speak texts written by the artist while walking through the city.

The Icelandic-German artist Hlynur Hallson’s text work Seven Artworks for Seven Different Places, located in different public spaces, is an example of a work that will be altered physically in unforeseen ways. The texts are about Oslo and have headlines such as This Is Oslo, The Mayor of Oslo and Immigrants in Oslo. The various text works have no planned common future even though they were launched as a single art project. Some of the texts will be removed because of negotiable agreements made but others will disappear slowly over time and become traces of something that has been covered by new statements and expressions, or simply erased by the weather and the processes of time. Arranging for this to happen and allowing this openness to prevail is an artistic and curatorial premise. It challenges the terms permanent and temporary, commonly used to indicate the life cycle of works of art in public space. Hallson’s work falls between these categories. It consists of bits and pieces of text that are gradually becoming uncoordinated and at some point will be swallowed up by the city that they are talking about and commenting on.

Another example of re-routing is UK-artist Ed D’Souza’s work Migrant Car. This work has moved through the centre of Oslo during the summer months. The work has adopted different roles and functions at different moments: as a car, a sculpture, an object, a toy, a situation, a meeting place, a critique, a migrant… During its life in Oslo, the work has come into close contact with large numbers of people, milieus and environments. These have triggered all sorts of contacts, interactions, connections and new trajectories. Migrant Car is now continuing its journey and leaving Oslo.

It is going north to Finnmark and Kirkenes with the intention of crossing the border into Russia...

The long lifespans of these works – whether episodic, cyclical, rhythmic, or recurrent – allow them to re-route themselves, to change character gradually, to respond to the unforeseeable shifts and occurrences of public space, or be eroded slowly by their constant contact with the city, whereby they may eventually disappear.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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The biennial also aims to leave the city of Oslo a legacy of resources – artists’ studios, film and radio units – that can continue to operate after this edition of the biennial closes.

The biennial is organized around four pillars associated with art production, public outreach, institutional collaboration and art collection. The pillars are not a theme for the biennial, but create frameworks and tools that the biennial uses and makes available to art in the making, to audiences/publics, to institutions, society, politics, and cultural policy:

Another part of our public outreach program has invited different agents and voices to design projects that generate readings and insights into particular aspects of the biennial, and the works it has hosted. Invitees include Michelangelo Miccolis, Belén Santillán, Benjamin Bardinet, and Mikaela Assolent.

Pillar 1. Art Production within a Locality

Pillar 3. New Institutional Ecologies

When osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 invites an artist, this includes an offer of studio and production facilities, as well as support for research and networking.

osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 works in collaboration with other institutions to foster new modes of art production and to influence cultural policy. A series of collaborations have already been set up with diverse entities in Norway and abroad. On October 18, 2019 osloBIENNALEN is screening the premiere of Javier Izquierdo’s film at the recently-opened cinema at Kunstnernes Hus, initiating discussions of art practices that make use of film and video and how to develop collaboration within this field. osloBIENNALEN has also collaborated with Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milano, in presenting Marianne Heier’s performance work And their Spirits Live On, as well as a publication about the piece.

For example, the creation of a biennial film production unit is underway, allowing artists to make new films. The first outcome is Crimes of the Future, a film by Javier Izquierdo about the film made by Henning Carlsen in 1966 on Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger. In this way, Izquierdo is employing a mise en abyme approach to make a film about a film about a novel about a city – Oslo. The second and third productions will be by Knut Åsdam and Dora García, respectively.

Pillar 2. Addressing the Myriad We are operating in public space and therefore the works on display address non-constituted audiences comprising an unknown and myriad set of passers-by.

Considering the right terms to apply to our methods and infrastructures, mediation was rejected in favour of outreach (although the search continues for an even more exact and appropriate term). We aim to provide each of the works in the biennial with its own specially-designed public outreach program.

Inclusion and the active involvement of members of the public lie at the heart of some of the works in the biennial, determining their evolution and outcome, for example the project by Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira titled Another Grammar for Oslo.

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Other collaboration partners involved in production and development to date include: Deichman, Oslo Public Libraries; Ekebergparken, Oslo; Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm; Le Magasin des Horizons, Grenoble; Matter of Art Biennial, Prague; NMBU-Norwegian University of Life Sciences: Faculty of Landscape and Society; Nordic Black Theatre; OsloMet, Faculty of Technology, Art and Design, Department of Art, Design and Drama; Kunsthall 3,14; Oslo domkirke/Oslo biskop; Oslo Open; Oslo kulturskole; Pikene på Broen, Kirkenes; Prosjektskolen kunstskole; Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm; Sporveien Oslo AS, Stiftelsen Edvard Munchs Atelier; Publics Helsinki; and Ultima, Oslo Festival of Contemporary Music.

CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Pillar 4. A collection for the passer-by

NEW WORKS OCTOBER 2019

osloBIENNALEN is reflecting on a purchasing policy for art in public space, especially immaterial art practices such as performance, sound pieces, ephemeral text-based proposals and situations.

These have rarely entered municipal collections and to date have not found their place in the Oslo City Art Collection. We remember those well-known art practices from earlier avant-garde periods – the dadaists, surrealists, situationists – with their often highly political interventions and actions, which have never properly taken their place in the historical legacies of the cities where they emerged.

In the few cases where they appear in collections, they do so as documentation to be archived and displayed in conventional exhibition spaces, which are quite different from the spaces and contexts for which they were originally created. Could we somehow re-activate these non-objectual works?

How might we preserve, collect, re-present, and experience them?

Adrián Balseca’s project The Observatory of Progress draws attention to the life of migrant birds in the city, to urban over-development, and global climate change. The project begins with a report by ‘The Observatory’, which includes a series of sketches, archive photos, and drawings, followed by a series of site-specific installations of functioning organic birds’ nests mounted on antique and historic lamp-posts, as well as on embellished, now out-of-service ‘descent towers’ that access underground power transformers across the city. Balseca’s interventions draw attention to often unnoticed city infrastructures and their cultural history, as an invitation to the viewer to rethink the anachronisms of modernity, while imagining an alternative use for these structures after their original function has been rendered obsolete.

At present, the biennial is arranging to purchase the performance piece The Viewers by Carole Douillard, a live performance of 18 people standing still in a group, a tableau vivant that stares out at the surroundings, at the city flux, at you, at us, at life, and perhaps the end of life.

Several of the works that are opening on October 18 2019, refer to major changes affecting the city. Oslo has been undergoing a tremendous transformation and large parts of the city centre are barely recognizable compared with only a few decades ago. Some of these changes are intentional and planned, they are a part of long-term urban development; but others are disputed. Other changes are the result of gradual but momentous global shifts, economic upheavals, migrations, technological transformation and climate change.

Many are the outcome of events no one could have predicted – we would rather be without them – but which have had much physical and mental impact on the city.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

Marcelo Cidade presents a sculptural installation with a very long name: a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around.

The installation is located under the Nylandsveien overpass in the central Oslo area of Grønland and is inspired by the surrounding urban architecture and cityscape. Placed along the border between two city districts, the sculpture takes the form of a movable gate that partly opens or blocks access depending on its position. Passers-by can change the position of the gate and so open or obstruct routes and connections between adjacent city districts. Cidade’s installation raises questions about the circulation of citizens, the idea of flux and concepts of individual freedom.

Jonas Dahlberg’s film is part of the week-long film season and seminar, “Where Memories Are Made,” organised in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus. Oliver Godow’s poetic, incisive photographs capture fragments and details of Oslo’s urban spaces and reveal how environments adapt and are adapted through use. Oslo 2014–2019 is a book and billboard project depicting scenes of the urban redevelopment the City of Oslo is undergoing. The billboard presentation of his work will take place at Majorstuen Station. Godow is interested in shapes and colours, light and lucidity, and the everyday echoed in careful observation of, for example, street corners, bus stops and posters. The images reflect a fascination with the way unregulated urban environments and spaces provide a rich and fertile ground for intervention by their users.

This ‘field study,’ as he describes the project, was carried out during various trips he made to Oslo over a period of five years. The dedicated artist book will be launched at Frankfurter Buchmesse by the publisher Hatje Cantz in partnership with osloBIENNALEN, as part of the Norway 2019 honorary program (October 16–20, 2019).

Opening weekend, May 2019

In 2014, artist Jonas Dahlberg won the government competition to create the national memorials for the July 22 2011 massacre. Under the title Memory Wound, his planned memorial to the Utøya massacre, would have cut a dramatic channel across the Sørbråten peninsula, which faces Utøya Island.

Proposing to create ‘a wound or a cut within the landscape’ to symbolise the feeling of loss, the plan evoked a mixed responses from a group of local residents, resulting in the cancellation of the project. Dahlberg’s new work, Notes on a Memorial, is a film about the process and politics around the 3-4 years he spent working on these memorials.

The film will premiere in Norway in October during the osloBIENNALEN opening weekend.

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Y-blokka by Katja Høst is a set of 24 black-andwhite postcards depicting the iconic modernist building, the Y-block, which formed part of the Norwegian government quarter for over fifty years.

Designed by architect Erling Viksjø, it features murals on the facade and in the lobby, created by Pablo Picasso in collaboration with the Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar. Parts of the Y-Block have been abandoned since the government quarter was targeted during a terrorist attack carried out on July 22, 2011. Høst’s postcards show the Government Quarter scarred by the bombings, alluding to a blind refusal to acknowledge the cultural and historical importance of the Y-blokka – a major monument to Norwegian modernity. Y-blokka raises questions about ideological heritage and collective memory, and the structures and mechanisms that sustain it, both physical and emotional. The postcards will be distributed for free across the city, placed in display racks in public institutions, offices, agencies, book shops, hotels and kiosks. Confirmed locations include: The Munch Museum, Kunstnernes Hus, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Grev Wedels plass Auksjoner, Visit Oslo, the National Museum – Architecture, Quality Hotel 33, and The National Library.

Filmmaker Javier Izquierdo presents a new medium-length documentary film produced by osloBIENNALEN, a film about a film about a book about a city. Crimes of the Future takes as its point of departure the Danish film adaptation of the Norwegian modernist novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun, published in 1888. Set in late 19th-century Kristiania (now Oslo), Hamsun’s book recounts the adventures of a starving young writer whose sense of reality is giving way to a delusional existence on the dark side of a modern metropolis. In its opening lines, Kristiania is described as a ‘wondrous city that no one leaves before it has made its marks upon him.’ The film adaptation, produced in 1966 and directed by Danish filmmaker Henning Carlsen, is considered a modernist masterpiece, for which actor Per Oscarsson won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his performance.

However, the film is no longer well known to Norwegian or international audiences. Through conversations with an array of Norwegian writers, filmmakers, psychiatrists, artists and more, Izquierdo investigates the impact of both the film and novel on generations of Norwegian culture and artistic practice, while exploring how it could speak of what it means to be an artist today. The film also revisits historic locations that still existed during the 1966 film production, but which have vanished or are almost unrecognisable today. In this way, Crimes of the Future becomes a portrait of a capital city that is undergoing significant renewal and displacement.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

PUBLIC OUTREACH – NEW PROJECTS OCTOBER 2019

Javier Izquierdo’s film is part of the week-long film season and seminar, “Where Memories Are Made,” organised in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus. The film will have its world premiere on the opening night of osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024’s October launch on Friday October 18.

For his project, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E), Norwegian artist Alexander Rishaug has made sound recordings in the Norwegian government quarter. “Y” refers to the Y-Block (Y-blokka), while the coordinates refer to the geographical position of the Highrise building (Høyblokka), the government building adjoining the Y block.

Made over two nights in October 2017, Rishaug’s recordings capture memory and place, through silence, acoustics, resonance, frequencies, vibrations and sub/ultrasounds that are not usually audible to humans. Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E) can be seen as a sonic portrait of the abandoned building’s current state of haunted emptiness, revealing how the absence evoked by this vacancy connects to events of July 22 2011.

For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, the recordings will be released as a double LP.

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The artist filmmaker Knut Åsdam presents an episodic film called Oslo, which will evolve over the coming years. Fragments from the first episode will be premiered on screens across the city at subway stations and other places of transit.

Interested in the urban environment, Åsdam explores physical and psychological reactions to the demands of contemporary society. The source material for each episode is stories and observations of Oslo, forming the core narrative of the work, which has a similar structure to the ways people make up their own narratives in everyday life, often from seemingly unrelated moments. A full version of the film will be presented in 2024.

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In October, Michelangelo Miccolis will perform the monologue, WHO CARES: Notes on how to address an audience – a performance journal, 1992–2017, in various public spaces and spheres, as well as in unannounced places around the city.

The text will also be printed as a separate booklet and distributed across the city. As part of his public outreach project for osloBIENNALEN, In Public: a living proposal, Miccolis is also working in relation to projects by other participants, such as Julien Bismuth’s ongoing work, Intet er stort intet er litet (Nothing is big nothing is small).

This publication registers the evolution of osloBIENNALEN at this point in October 2019 and presents all the projects that the biennial has hosted to date – new, ongoing, or completed. osloBIENNALEN: the biennial that never closes.

CURATORS’ INTRODUCTION

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NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

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ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

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ADRIÁN BALSECA

JULIEN BISMUTH

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MARCELO CIDADE A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND

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Ellie Ga Oar of Words, Rudders of Speech

Sindre Andersen Free Play

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CAROLE DOUILLARD

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JONAS DAHLBERG

Manuel Pelmuš What do The Viewers see?

Jonas Dahlberg Notes on a Memorial

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ED D’SOUZA

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OLIVER GODOW

Denis Bocquet The car-free zone

Karen Irvine Form under construction

Kamilla Freyr On craftsmanship, contemporary art and a car on its travels

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KATJA HØST

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METTE EDVARDSEN

Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen Norwegian autumn

Frøydis Århus Non-material literature

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JAVIER IZQUIERDO CRIMES OF THE FUTURE A FILM ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A BOOK ABOUT A CITY

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JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

Roskva Koritzinsky My first masterpiece

Jan Freuchen / Jonas Høgli Major / Sigurd Tenningen # 1: Collection: Disparate fragments on the philosophy of collecting.

What is a collection? Where does it begin, and where does it end?

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HLYNUR HALLSSON

Markús Þór Andrésson On the work of Hlynur Hallsson

Kari Ósk Grétudóttir Ege The Feng Shui Problem

Kristin Kjartansdóttir The Mayor of Oslo

Jill Maurah Leciejewski This is Oslo

Einar Bjarki Malmquist Precisely Oslo

Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir Immigrants in Oslo

Alexander Steig Rochade

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MÔNICA NADOR / BRUNO OLIVEIRA

THE OBSERVATORY OF PROGRESS

NOTES ON A MEMORIAL

OSLO 2014–2019

Y-BLOKKA

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ALEXANDER RISHAUG

Tore Stavlund The haunted emptiness of absence – a sonic portrait of Høyblokka

Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E)

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KNUT ÅSDAM

Aina Villanger Film-Making Fragments

OSLO

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INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

THE VIEWERS

MIGRANT CAR

TIME HAS FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE — A LIBRARY OF LIVING BOOKS

OSLO COLLECTED WORKS OSV.

SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS

ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO

Deise Faria Nunes The Power of Listening: Diapraxis, play and another grammar for the city

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ROSE HAMMER

Sven Lütticken The Name of the Rose — Fragments from a conversation with Rose Hammer

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LISA TAN

Josh Shaddock Take the Stairs

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NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

OTHER ARTISTS

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COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 2019

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PUBLIC OUTREACH AND RESEARCH

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GAYLEN GERBER

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Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen Symphony in Grey

MIKAELA ASSOLENT

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MARIANNE HEIER

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BENJAMIN BARDINET

SUPPORTS

AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

Line Ulekleiv Porous material, active actions

THE BODY-DOUBLE

Mikaela Assolent The Body-Double A MAP TO GET LOST: A DRIFT THROUGH CONCEPTS, FACTS AND RUMOURS

Martin Braathen Removals

Marius Wulfsberg Unfolding a map

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MICHAEL ROSS

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MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS

TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES)

Sindre Andersen The fairy-tale that whispered itself

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ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN POWER LINE HUM (COMPOSITION FOR THE ORGAN IN OSLO CITY HALL) / POWER BALANCE (COMPOSITION FOR PIANO, ALTERNATING CURRENT AND ORCHESTRA)

Arve Rød City Hall Electronica – the low G of the power grid

Jurriaan Benschop A Common Cause? – A Visit to Oslo City Hall

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IN PUBLIC: A LIVING PROPOSAL

Michelangelo Miccolis Who cares: Notes on how to address an audience

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019 ADRIÁN BALSECA THE OBSERVATORY OF PROGRESS

MARCELO CIDADE A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND

JONAS DAHLBERG NOTES ON A MEMORIAL

OLIVER GODOW OSLO 2014–2019

KATJA HØST Y-BLOKKA

JAVIER IZQUIERDO CRIMES OF THE FUTURE A FILM ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A BOOK ABOUT A CITY

ALEXANDER RISHAUG Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E)

KNUT ÅSDAM OSLO

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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Adrián Balseca’s project The Observatory of Progress brings attention to the life of migrant birds in the city, to urban overdevelopment, and global climate change. The project begins with a report by ‘The Observatory’, that includes a series of sketches, archive photos, and drawings, followed by a series of site-specific installations of functioning organic birds’ nests mounted on antique and historic lamp-posts, as well as on embellished, now out-of-service ‘descent towers’ that access underground transformer power stations across the city.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

ADRIÁN BALSECA THE OBSERVATORY OF PROGRESS LAUNCH

OCTOBER, 2019 DESCRIPTION

ARTIST PUBLICATION AND SCULPTURAL INSTALLATIONS STATUS

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019. WILL EVOLVE IN 2020

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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ADRIÁN BALSECA (b. 1989) lives and works in Quito, Ecuador. Balseca works between photography, installation and film to activate strategies and discussions of representation, narration, and/or interaction in order to highlight the specificities of ecosystems in a particular territory. Balseca’s artistic research engages with several socialenvironmental agendas and in particular with historical-economic processes, and their links to globally relevant environmental issues.

Can light for human beings mean darkness for the birds? Adrián Balseca’s project for osloBIENNALEN is to plan, build and install birds’ nests on antique street lamps and in underground access towers in Oslo. These are landmarks of Oslo’s dramatic period of expansion in the late nineteenth century.

Street lighting was a precondition for development and population growth, and brought life to the city streets; electricity supplied homes and powered the appliances we now take for granted. A century has passed since street lamps and ‘manhole towers’ appeared – it seems an eternity. But viewed from the immeasurable, billion-year perspective of nature, it is only an instant. Nevertheless, humans have changed the world dramatically over the last century, and at a pace that has no equal in history.

Alongside street lighting and the harnessing of electricity, a growing population moves further and faster and progressively produces, consumes, and discards more and more. All of this is powered by fossil fuels with dire consequences for weather and wind systems, for plants and insects, and for the flight patterns of migratory birds. As the birds take over street lamps and manhole towers, we are warned of the price of human growth and development.

ADRIÁN BALSECA

THE OBSERVATORY OF PROGRESS. ORIGINAL SKETCHES COURTESY OF OSLO CITY ARCHIVES

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ADRIÁN BALSECA

THE OBSERVATORY OF PROGRESS

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ADRIÁN BALSECA

Marcelo Cidade presents an outdoor sculpture installation under the Nylandsbrua bridge, in the central Oslo area of Grønland. Placed at the border between two city districts, the sculpture takes the form as a movable gate that partly gives way or blocks access depending on its position.

Cidade’s installation evokes conversations on the circulation of citizens, the idea of flux and the concept of individual freedom.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

MARCELO CIDADE A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND AROUND A ROUND

LAUNCH

OCTOBER, 2019 DESCRIPTION

OUTDOOR SCULPTURE INSTALLATION LOCATION

UNDER THE NYLANDSBRUA BRIDGE, GRØNLAND STATUS

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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MARCELO CIDADE (b. 1979, São Paulo) is an artist who works with the creation or modification of urban environments to produce new, often unexpected, and poetically expressive works and situations. His work inserts itself in the constant flux between the shared experience of public spaces and spheres, and our subjective interior space and experience.

Through different aesthetic strategies, Cidade creates works that give expression to complex social conflicts and bring signifiers and situations from the street into spaces primarily dedicated to art, and vice versa.

Is there such a thing as a liberating barrier?

Marcelo Cidade’s work for osloBIENNALEN is a revolving barred gate in steel installed beneath the Nylandsbrua bridge. The gate pivots on its axis, a bar at its centre, and resembles a manually operated revolving door. The area beneath Nylandsbrua bridge – a notorious site of shady activities – separates the Grønland area from the rest of the city. Grønland has always been a district with its own identity. Now it is famous for its immigrant population of mainly Muslim origins. In the 1840s, Grønland was situated outside the city boundaries, characterized by prostitution, alcoholism and petty crime, so that the city authorities proposed making the area a ‘free city.’ But Grønland became a part of Oslo, although it remained poverty-stricken.

This was where cholera epidemics first broke out, and where the Salvation Army was first established in Norway. In this way, the boundary between Grønland and the rest of the city has a long history and is sharply felt by the citizens.

Cidade’s work reminds us that politicians have the power to set up barriers and gates between desirable and undesirable areas, gates that can shut people out – or in. But this gate is easy to traverse, and invites us to swing it around, climb on it, play with it. Here, it is the population that has the power.

MARCELO CIDADE

A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND. ARTIST RENDERING

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Sindre Andersen FREE PLAY — ABOUT THE WORK A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND A ROUND AROUND

BY MARCELO CIDADE Sindre Andersen is a Norwegian translator, critic and lyricist. In this essay he writes about Marcelo Cidade’s interest in the indefinable urban space, which he views in terms of Dutch architect Aldo van Eick’s “poetic structuralism.”

I’m standing in a revolving door and thinking, “Actually, I’m not.” Because in a revolving door you have to keep moving. You don’t stand there dreaming and reflecting. A revolving door is a zone of transit, a white, transparent no-man’s land in which you are sluiced through a merry-goround, over the threshold from one public area to another; to something enclosed – a lobby, a shopping mall. The spinning of the door is, if not industrially, then at least practically determined.

You don’t come here to play. Revolving doors were invented and introduced in the USA right at the end of the nineteenth century, apparently to avoid draughts and to keep horses out of hotels and restaurants.

Brazilian Marcelo Cidade has created a large revolving door for the Oslo Biennale, or more precisely a revolving gate – rather primitive it must be said – and placed it in the notorious, hidden-away underpass beneath the Nylandsbrua bridge in the Oslo neighbourhood of Grønland.

Unlike other revolving doors, which often put you in one of three or four compartments, Cidade’s white-painted gate consists of just one surface, with a bar as a pivot in the middle. The diameter extends between two concrete posts. It is made of steel and you can climb up it – although presumably only children are able to get their feet between the bars or into the characteristic diamond-shaped footholds. He has taken the pattern from a type of lattice security grille that is common in small shops in Latin America and Portugal.

The revolving gate stands close to the banks of Akerselva, a river bed running from Nydalen and the College of Art down to the Opera at its mouth, which in the time since the turn of the millennium has been given a better-groomed and delicately creative look. Nevertheless, just here, where the Vaterland bridge crosses the river and marks the boundary between Grønland and Vaterland, you still find among other things the city’s main area for hash dealing.

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The bridge underpass, where the gate stands in gloom more or less all day and night, used to have a flea-market, which was closed down some time ago because of the abundance of stolen goods.

Crossing the Vaterland Bridge from west to east still feels like crossing a tiny barrier.

“People in Oslo are afraid of this place, but I’m not,” Marcelo Cidade tells me on Skype from the other side of the planet, although the time difference is only five hours. He is sitting somewhere in the big bulge on the map of South America, in São Paulo, the city where he has always lived and worked, and where the privatization of public spaces has gone further than in most other capital cities.

The city’s well known prohibition of outdoor advertising from ten years ago was meant to function as a counterweight to this, but it has also affected the non-commercial culture of posters and promotions, Cidade tells me. He himself is no fan of the prohibition, which he thinks in the final analysis obstructs democratic expression.

During his stay in our own small capital, the São Paulian has noted that this shady spot is a kind of heart, a special hub, a border zone between two sides of Oslo. Grønland is both centre and periphery at once, an ‘immigrant neighbourhood’ that is no longer either particularly inexpensive or poor. He himself has worked at street level since his youth; first with spray cans and skateboards, later as an established artist looking for areas that are in the grey zone between public and private. It is places like this that he wants to make visible. In 2001, in the work In/Out, he prised stones loose from a pavement in São Paulo and put them together in a mosaic on the gallery floor.

In 2014, he moved a large square piece of asphalt from a car park into a gallery space. What he was trying to show was both the empty space in the car park and the asphalt in the gallery. He called the work Somewhere, Elsewhere, Anywhere, Nowhere, and it was located both indoors and outdoors, on both public and private property, and perhaps somewhere else, in some third place.

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We also find this interest in the indefinable urban space in the work of the architect Aldo van Eyck, well known and influential for his ‘poetic structuralism’ and his powerful challenge to the Functionalism of the inter-war years. One of the most important things that van Eyck built was playgrounds; several hundred different ones around Amsterdam in the decades just after World War II; with climbing frames shaped like igloos, small sand boxes, and minimalist asymmetrical hoops for swinging on, if you wish. Open forms typified by a suggestive user-friendliness which at the time was quite revolutionary in its field. The Dutchman’s utility sculptures appealed greatly to the creativity of children, and were based on a radical view of human social relations, with artistic links to the Situationists and the avant-garde CoBrA group.

Few of van Eyck’s play apparatus still stand today, and although there was never room for merrygo-rounds in the architect’s vision, Cidade’s oldfashioned latticework comes closer to van Eyck’s Situationist understanding of play and urban space than it does to the plastic spinning-tops that stand and rock in the playgrounds of our own time.

Marcelo Cidade, a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around, 2019, artist rendering

MARCELO CIDADE

A gate in rusty-grey surroundings, a simple mechanical sculpture, without the direct absurdity of some of Cidade’s earlier work. It is both hard and cheerful, fresh and old-fashioned; it fools around with us; it isn’t black, as one might perhaps expect (and as it was conceived at the time when I talked to Cidade) – it is shiny-white, a whitepainted fence that lights up the grey surroundings.

In one sense, it’s a do-it-yourself revolving door without any function, situated in a kind of noman’s land. In another sense, it’s a fence, normally used to enclose, but here ‘loosened up’ to make a playground.

Play as an activity can function as a territory marked-off from the established, and may even be consciously law-breaking. But just as often it remains blissfully unaware of both laws and the world order, as children (and seriously playing grown-ups) often are. Rather than the forbidden and subversive, what is revealed at this obscure spot in the city is play as possibility and entertainment, as lawless, pointless activity.

And the circle drawn by the revolving gate radiates new circles beyond it, around it, from it. It reminds us of the city’s various functions and phenomena: rotation, dis-location, role-playing, semi-democratization. If we elevate our gaze a little, the urban economy itself as an activity is also a form of controlled play where the masses are drawn into a game that pretends to be freedom. Viewed this way, the roundabout becomes a grindstone, another mill in a succession of many, where inside is slavery and outside is freedom.

Fortunately Cidade has made the gate wide and spacious, so it does not easily get crowded. You can vary and improvise. How big could he have made it? Could a roundabout have swept the whole city along with it?

In our society, all public areas are in fact zones of transit. And a revolving door is a roundabout, an involuntary perpetual motion machine in urban space, a place to hide. It forces you to slow down. If you hesitate on the periphery, you are in danger. You might be knocked out. Border zones are dangerous: if you stand on the border of the border, you are in a new state of exposure. Why not stay put and keep on turning round and round in the revolving door? Again, you will embrace public space as a playground, and be given free play to think. Thoughts need (indeed are) motion, but not necessarily from one place to another.

What if the world itself could move to a rhythm that followed the whims of the player, the child?

A little forward, a little backward, always around and around, rolling and alternating at the same time, almost as a consolation for standing still.

It already does. But that is why we should enter Cidade’s roundabout again, to renew ourselves and create our own freedom, our own tempo, by both denying and parodying the world. This is not going to the mall – or home.

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MARCELO CIDADE

In 2014, artist Jonas Dahlberg won the government competition to create the national memorials for the July 22 2011 massacre. Notes on a Memorial is a film about the process, debate and politics around the project, resulting in the cancellation of the planned memorials.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

JONAS DAHLBERG NOTES ON A MEMORIAL

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JONAS DAHLBERG (b. 1970, Borås, Sweden) is an artist living in Stockholm, Sweden. Dahlberg’s practice is situated at the intersection of art, architecture, the private and the political. His diverse works include video installations, photography, scenography and publications, as well as projects closer to architecture. In recent years he has become known for his winning proposal for the memorial sites to honour the victims of the terrorist attack in Oslo and Utøya, Norway, in 2011.

How do we commemorate pain and sorrow? Jonas Dahlberg’s work for osloBIENNALEN is a film about memorials that were never built. Dahlberg was selected to create national memorials to the terror attack of 22 July 2011. The memorial to the Utøya massacre was to consist of a cut, 40 meters long and 3.5 meters wide, through a peninsula facing Utøya. It was designed so that visitors would descend to a niche hollowed out on one side of the channel and remember the victims of the terror attack, whose names were to be carved on the rock wall on the opposite side. The stone excavated to create the channel was then to be carved into memorial tablets and placed in the Government Quarter, with the names of the entire population living in Norway on 22 July 2011.

But some of the local residents living near the planned memorial did not want any memorial in their neighbourhood. Following an embroiled and tortuous political process, the construction of the memorial site was cancelled. Remembering an evil is a precondition for becoming reconciled to it. At the same time, the culture of the memorial is a complex field of symbolism that impacts on collective experiences and individual feelings in differing ways. Dahlberg’s film from 2018, reflects on the process and politics around the 3-4 years working on these memorials.

JONAS DAHLBERG

NOTES ON A MEMORIAL. FILM STILL

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Jonas Dahlberg NOTES ON A MEMORIAL The following text is the script for Jonas Dahlberg’s film Notes on a Memorial from 2018.

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On the afternoon of July 22, 2011, a powerful car bomb exploded at the government headquarters in central Oslo. The bomb killed eight people and injured more than 30 others. The terrorist who carried out the bombing then traveled from central Oslo to the island of Utøya, in the municipality of Hole, where the youth association of the Norwegian Labor Party holds a summer camp with approximately 560 attendees. There, he killed 69 people and injured 66, most of them under 20. His actions were politically motivated and his goal was to prevent the development of the next generation of social democratic leadership in Norway.

My idea for the memorial was based on some emotional observations from our initial visit to Utøya, when we were taken around the island by one of the survivors of the attack. It struck me at that time how different it felt walking around out in nature, compared to the feeling of walking through the rooms in the main building where many had been killed. The experience of seeing those empty rooms, and the traces of extreme violence, filled me and the others with deep sorrow.

Some of us started to cry.

I felt almost immediately that it was important to me for the memorial to offer something very different from that type of experience. Before we got to the memorial site, we had the opportunity to hear from some of the survivors. They talked about “taking back the island and making it theirs again.” It started to feel more and more problematic that, while these kids were trying with all their might to move on so that they could gather there again each summer to talk politics, listen to music, sneak a beer, and maybe meet that special someone, at the same time there would be a group of people standing at the tip of this outcropping, looking and pointing at the island as if it were evil incarnate.

The thought of that kind of gaze reminded me of something that had happened during our bus trip to Utøya from Oslo. As we crested a rise and saw Tyrifjord lake for the first time, someone in the bus thought they saw Utøya. This made everyone in the bus jump out of their seats and peer out the side of the bus where you could see better. But pretty soon someone told us it wasn’t Utøya we saw, and we all sat down again right away.

There is a powerful force of attraction in places like this. It may not always be a positive force in us, but it’s human and it’s hard to resist.

For this reason, the journey to the memorial clearly becomes an important part of the memorial itself, because the journey also contributes to this energy.

The risk, of course, is that it unwillingly seizes that energy and enables a gaze towards the island that is primarily passive, almost voyeuristic. It transforms Utøya into a monument in itself. So it felt important to me that we, as visitors to the memorial, would look at Utøya and at what happened there through our own sorrow – turning our gaze first inward rather than outward.

2 Two and a half years later, I sat on a bus on my way from Oslo to Utøya. The Norwegian government had announced an international competition for the creation of memorials to commemorate the victims of this act of terror. In the bus were the architects and artists invited to this competition.

6 But while the building served as a reminder of the terrorist act, things were very different out in nature. Though we stood in places where many people had lost their lives, and were told who they were and how they had died, nature had already begun its work of hiding the traces. As time passes, the emotions we felt inside the building will begin to shift, and ultimately to fade to some degree – like an open wound that is sewn up and eventually becomes a pale scar.

3 The island of Utøya sits in Tyrifjorden, a large lake in the municipality of Hole. Hole has about 6,000 residents and leans rightward politically, but the island of Utøya itself has been owned by the Norwegian Labor Party since 1950. Every year, the party’s youth association holds a summer camp there that includes political workshops.

7 After the visit to the island, we went to the planned site for the memorial. The land narrows to a point that juts out from the mainland towards Utøya, and here you have a view of Utøya over the water that’s like the perfect landscape composition.

4 It takes about 40 minutes to drive to Utøya from central Oslo, and on the last leg you find yourself on a small country road. The idea was to put a parking area next to the planned memorial site and from the parking area, a walkway would cross over a field to the memorial. The spot chosen for the memorial was on the mainland, at the tip of Sørbråten Point, which juts out towards Utøya.

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This was the first thing I focused on when I began sketching – how to counteract that type of gaze out towards the island.

First, I placed a sort of wall out in the water. But that felt wrong. I didn’t want to create a monument.

Instead, I moved the wall up onto the point so that it blocked the view to the island, and also hindered access to the actual memorial site.

Visitors now find themselves in this private room inside the cliff. Surrounded by nature, they hear the water floating by, the wind. They see the light reflected against the cliff wall across the canal, where the names of those we can no longer reach are engraved in the rock.

10 But something still felt very wrong, as if it became a kind of monument anyway, or a structure that risked expressing something different than what was intended.

So I started thinking about taking away the wall, pushing it down into the ground.

Making it disappear, or become invisible.

Create a kind of void. Like a cut or a wound in nature itself.

11 The monument was now gone, and the viewer’s ability to move toward the tip of the point was disrupted. But the view of the island remained, and the site was missing a more intimate and private spot.

So I pushed the movement itself down into the ground and let it create a ramp and a tunnel that led down to a somewhat more private room inside the cliff.

12 To bring together the whole progression to the memorial site, I moved the proposed straight path over the fields so that it wended its way through the woods instead. Visitors would now move from the parking area along a contemplative five- to ten-minute walk through the woods up to the spot where the path cut into the landscape, down into the cliff, to a short tunnel that leads to the edge of the cut itself.

NOTES ON A MEMORIAL

14 My proposal for the memorial at Sørbråten Point is to make a cut or a wound in nature itself. It seeks to recreate the physical experience of taking away, and to reflect over the sudden and permanent loss of those who died. The memorial tries consciously to disrupt the view of the island in order to create a more private space where our gaze turns inward on ourselves.

15 The cut that slices off the tip of the point is a three-and-a-half-meter wide excavation, and the void created in the landscape makes it impossible to reach the tip. The rock removed during excavation would be transported to Oslo and used to build the memorial in the government district.

16 Immediately after it was announced that my proposal had won the competition, the one image in which the cut was most apparent began to go viral. Maybe in a way the memorial did end up being built during this time, despite everything, because it shows up in books, newspapers, tv, radio, dissertations, and other publications.

After about a week of almost exclusively positive responses, a group of 20-30 residents in the area made their reaction known. They were led by a local right-wing politician who also sat on the planning committee in Hole. They said that the memorial was brutal and that they didn’t want to be reminded every day of what happened.

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While the image of the memorial continued to spread around the world, I now got requests from the Norwegian government, wondering if it was possible to make the cut a little less visible. Could the “gap” be reduced slightly? Could it be turned another direction? Could trees be planted to conceal it? They even suggested filling in parts of the cut to make it a little less violent. But to me it’s strange to talk about the memorial in itself as brutal. Isn’t it the event it’s meant to remind us of that is brutal?

The memorial tries to capture the brutal nature of the act and some of what lies behind it, but also to draw near the fragility of the grieving process.

17 The wound – the 40-meter long and 3.5-meter wide cut through the rock of an unpopulated point of land – could only be seen from certain angles. It would barely be visible to those who lived or traveled through the area. But since the illustration that spread in the media was from another angle, it didn’t matter if reality looked different at the actual locations in question. The viral image of the memorial was so strong in people’s minds that it now looked that way no matter where you looked from.

18 During the next three years or so, there was an intense public debate about the memorial in the Norwegian media. It often seemed to me that the debate was focused on the wrong issues. But even though it got rather strident and skewed at times, I still believe that debate is an important part of the grieving process that a community, and individuals, need to go through. After all, how are you really supposed to remember an event like this? What guided me throughout my work was my belief that artistic creation can help in a very specific way to keep the conversation about traumatic events alive, and that this conversation in itself can have a healing effect. I believe that visual art plays a special role in relation to events that seem almost incomprehensible, and so hard to describe with words. It’s not that art replaces other forms – on the contrary, journalism, science, religion, and other ways of responding are necessary. What I mean is that art plays another role, less dependent on language than the others but no less important.

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Twice, the government pushed back construction on the memorial. A planned 2015 opening became 2016, then 2017. But the group of local residents had made their decision, and then, in the summer of 2016, they sued the Norwegian government.

The matter was led by Jan Tore Sanner, minister for local government in Høyre, who proposed a settlement to the locals in which the government would stop work on the proposal about a month before construction was scheduled to begin. However, since the group had clearly stated they did not want any sort of memorial in the area, they rejected the proposed settlement. Work on the memorial at Sørbråten Point was now put on hold until the outcome of the suit, but it was decided that, in the meantime, I should continue working on the memorial for the government district in Oslo.

19 As I sat in my studio in Stockholm working on my competition proposal during the fall and winter of 2013, I was completely sheltered and existed in a kind of zone of silence. I had lost my father about a year earlier, and for the first time I was able to get close to my own grief and process it. There were a lot of emotions from my own situation that I could draw on for the work with the memorial on Sørbråten Point – a place that, in a way, didn’t much differ from the mental place I was in there in the studio. The memorial for the government district in Oslo lacked a clear, specific site for me to respond to – not just because it was going to be new, meaning that no one in the competition really knew what to respond to, but maybe also because it was harder for me in general to relate to a government location, a center of political life. But in fall 2016, when I was asked to further develop the sketches for the memorial in Oslo, both my internal and external landscape had changed. The public debate surrounding the memorial at Sørbråten Point meant that I could anchor my work in a different way. It gave me the site-specificity in relation to the government district that was missing in 2013. Now I was at the heart of the national conversation, in the center of the debate, and sketching a memorial for the center of political life.

JONAS DAHLBERG

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The government buildings in Oslo lie in the heart of the city, and like all such districts around the world they tend to lose much of their urban character in the evening. Pretty much nothing happens in these neighborhoods at night, when the people who work there have gone home. After an act of terror it’s not just national borders that risk being closed, but also in buildings, sites, and even in people. As I started to think about this, it felt important for the memorial to try to counteract that kind of development, to work instead towards openness and to try to create life and movement in the area. As I sat and thought about this, and about the conversations that had occurred about the memorials, I started thinking about what it would mean if, rather than showing the people who the terrorist killed, the way most memorials do, it showed everyone else. The whole society.

The memorial in the government district in Oslo would consist of this archive of approximately 2,000 large stone slabs engraved with just over five million names. The names would belong to the 77 people who died, along with every other person who was registered in the Norwegian population directory on July 22, 2011. The names of those who lost their lives were to be distinguished by being surrounded by a few extra centimeters of space.

The five million names would not be in alphabetical order; rather, they would be placed next to each other at random. My hope was that a first glance would emphasize our shared connection: we are all people, we are all named, we are all witnesses on this day.

This searching makes it a potentially active place, since generation after generation would find a reason to search for the names of parents, relatives, and others. This simple activation means that, as in an oral storytelling tradition, the five million people who were there on that day would carry forward the story of what happened and of those who lost their lives.

Jonas Dahlberg, Memory Wound, 2014. Land Art

21 And in this way allow those who died to emerge through everyone else. If one were to work off the Norwegian population directory, which is based on residence and not citizenship or nationality, then there were just over five million people in Norway on July 22, 2011. All such directories are of course problematic in and of themselves. Who is seen, and who is made invisible? However, I felt that such an archive or document of this day would also problematize important questions related to what happened. This rather simple idea, or image, became a starting point for me in the work. It felt natural to imagine that this archive of five million names would be carved in stone, like an ancient text.

From the beginning the idea was to use the rock taken from the memorial at Sørbråten Point to make stone slabs, but if that memorial wouldn’t be done in time, or at all, then another type of stone could be used without significantly weakening the concept.

NOTES ON A MEMORIAL

26 Because when you search for your name, you would sometimes encounter names that have a little more space around them, like a breath: the names of those who lost their lives to that act of terror. In this encounter, your existential search would be reframed.

23 During the construction of the new government buildings, the memorial would gradually expand over the course of the 7-10 years it will take to complete the building process. As the large stone slabs with engraved names were completed, they would be installed on-site at ceremonial occasions.

With all the stone slabs installed, there would be 77 stacks that together would contain the names of those who lost their lives as well as everyone who was registered in Norway on July 22, 2011.

24 When the new government buildings was completed, the stacks of stone slabs would be moved and laid out on the ground, thereby creating a larger area for reflection and engagement. Those who came to the memorial would perhaps search for their own name, or that of a family member or friend. It’s a sort of existential need: our search for our place in the world.

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27 As your body walks there, you encounter those who have been robbed of this possibility. The living and the dead, side by side. Living entails a responsibility to others; it even entails a responsibility for what happened on July 22, 2011.

28 Before my proposal for the memorial for the government district was made public, I found out at a press conference held by the government in June 2017 that my work on Memory Wound at Sørbråten was being called off. Soon after the press conference, I also found out that my entire contract for the memorials was being revoked. This meant that not only would Memory Wound at Sørbråten Point never be realized, but the ongoing work with the Oslo memorial would end. At the press conference, the government also announced that it was important for future memorials to be “low-key.” But what does this mean, exactly? I am convinced that the point of a national memorial is to honor those who lost their lives by insisting on a continued collective conversation about what happened. Though uncomfortable at times, this conversation in and of itself is what allows trauma to be processed in the long run. A memorial that strives for everyone to be in silent agreement runs the risk of minimizing what happened, and contributes to our forgetting of the circumstances.

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Jonas Dahlberg woke me up, I was asleep on my couch.

You have to come, he said.

Go to the panoramic window, look! Now it’s happening all by itself!

It’s a marvel, it just happened, here in Hole municipality.

The marvel itself marveled. Of course, everyone who had tried to say that mountains cannot shout any hoorays or comfort anyone, silent and marvelous, went quiet.

That’s the way it went, because mountains can divide after all.

Just as everyone had turned away, had turned their chairs, had been indifferent and had to head over to such-and-such town and mind their own business, or extend the terrace, the land simply divided itself.

The fjord filled up, because water can’t stand being empty. But I saw nothing. I relaxed, had stopped gazing at the fjord long ago. Meanwhile the memorial was in place.

Just like the competition winner. Just right.

A loaf of sliced bread missing a slice. Our own void with water under, our void with sky above.

We can’t tell anyone about this, Jonas Dahlberg, no one would take us seriously, I said.

No, he said. No one wants to believe that nature is like that, that it can be comforting.

My daughter was so sick and tired of my monument.

She felt so sorry for nature out here, he said.

No, and now this covers my rubber boats. It happened this evening I can tell. It happened on its own with a spell. It happened in a parallel.

It happened in a Fjordland that is not.

I don’t believe you’re aware of what you’re doing, Jonas, I said. I scrounge up some dinner. Do you want to watch the Saturday soccer game with me?

The microwave beeped.

Cecilie Løveid, Vandreutstillinger, Kolofon forlag 2017

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Oliver Godow’s Oslo 2014–2019 is a book and a billboard project depicting scenes of the urban development the City of Oslo has been – and still is – undergoing.

The images reflect a fascination with the way unregulated urban environments and spaces provide a rich and fertile ground for intervention by their users.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

OLIVER GODOW OSLO 2014–2019

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OLIVER GODOW’s (b. 1968, Lübeck, Germany) poetic, incisive photographs observe fragments and details of urban spaces and objects and reveal how environments adapt and are adapted through use. His work reflects a fascination with the way the unregulated urban environment provides a rich and fertile ground for intervention by its inhabitants – whether through choice or necessity – who adapt and transform their surroundings both publically and in private. Godow’s images show tiny fragments of a world that we struggle with and brush past on a daily basis. Their quiet melancholy is often accompanied by a wry smile,delighting in the anthropomorphic qualities of architecture through isolated yet potent details.

Is it possible to capture rapid change? In 2014, the photo artist Oliver Godow decided to create a portrait of Oslo in transformation. He travelled repeatedly to the city, taking close-ups of changes to the city as they happened. We have all noticed how the city has undergone rapid change over the past decade or so. The city has been crammed with demolition sites and containers, building sites and cranes, scaffolding, tarpaulins and stacks of building materials. A rapidly redeveloping city has a distinctive aesthetic visible in tiny leftovers and traces marking the urban fabric. One day they are there, the next they are gone. Without Godow’s insight and camera, these changes might pass us by altogether. osloBIENNALEN is showing some of Godow’s photographs on billboards in the centre of Majorstua, while the publisher Hatje Cantz, in collaboration with the Biennial, will issue an artist publication of the full set of images. Small details will be blown up to a gigantic format in public space, while within the book format transitory moments will be recorded forever.

OLIVER GODOW

OSLO 2014–2019

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Karen Irvine FORM UNDER CONSTRUCTION Karen Irvine is Chief Curator and Deputy Director at The Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College, Chicago.

The following essay was originally published as part of Oliver Godow’s book Oslo 2014–2019.

As a portrait of a city, Oliver Godow’s (German, b. 1968) photographs of Oslo bewilder us. Although a few key photographs — of street signs and the Norwegian flag, for example — signal location, most of his images eschew indicators of place in favor of details that reveal something more elusive. Characterized by an interplay of line, color, texture, and light, Godow’s photographs are often dynamic compositions that pulsate with graphic form. In many of them, details of construction materials are abstracted to varying degrees, revealing urban transformation through minutiae.

Urban change fascinates Godow. He made the photographs from 2014 to 2019, at the height of a prolonged building boom in Oslo. One of the richest and most technologically advanced cities in the world, Oslo has experienced a radical transformation in the past decade. Its wealth comes from oil — since the discovery of North Sea oil and gas reserves in the 1960s, Norway has become one the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and natural gas. Yet the country’s relationship to oil is complicated. With a population that leans very green and national policies that lead the world in lowering carbon emissions within its own borders, Norway is nonetheless effectively promoting the opposite abroad as one of the world’s largest oil and natural gas exporters.

In 2005 and 2006, Godow spent some time in Oslo, intrigued by its massive urban development.

Then, in 2013, he heard that two new museums were to be built in the center of the city — the Munch Museum and the National Museum (both still under construction today), and he decided to return there to work. After his seven-year absence, Godow barely recognized Oslo. Likening it to a sleeping beauty awakened by the building of the monumental opera house designed by Snøhetta in 2008, Godow saw a city completely changed. He was now shocked and fascinated by the continuous and omnipresent development, noting that there was “almost no street, no public building not being affected by the upheaval.”1

1 Oliver Godow, email correspondence with the author, June 16, 2019.

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But how to represent such a broad transformation?

Godow wandered through the city with his camera, drawn to its distinctive hues, patterns, and materials.

His close-ups of ripped posters, painted walls, and various construction materials edge toward abstraction in the spirit of mid-twentieth-century photographers Aaron Siskind (American, 1903 –1991) and Harry Callahan (American, 1912 –1999), who reveled in photography’s ability to flatten and partially abstract a scene. Other images recall the work of Luigi Ghirri (Italian, 1943 –1992), who in the 1970s created colorful, dream-like pictures of quotidian scenes and ephemeral architecture.

In Godow’s work, similarly captivating images such as an air-filled pink jacket or a giant blue umbrella next to an amorphous plastic bundle suggest sculpture and transform the banal scenes into something more mysterious.

Godow’s sequencing underscores his images’ formal connections. Indeed, he uses repetition as a conceptual tool — colors and shapes and motifs repeat multiple times throughout the project, adding a layer of formal order to otherwise messy scenes. Sometimes his sequencing creates moments of humor or evokes anthropomorphism, such as a photograph of a poster depicting a werewolf followed by an image of a badly scratched surface.

In one image, scraps of drywall cut into rectangles, triangles, and circles resemble a children’s game.

Such moments of levity and playfulness convey an optimism that Godow has witnessed in the new Oslo — a society shaken by the terrorist attacks of 2011 that remains determined to build a greener, more technologically advanced, and more democratic society.2

Provocatively, Godow steers clear of the recently built museums and developments designed by fancy architects, and instead refers to them obliquely.

Rather than creating photographs of the new Bjørvika — the “Barcode”-development, a hip mixed-use complex named for the shape it forms with narrow buildings lined up side-by-side, Godow documents just one of its tram stops. He tightly frames the structure: its glowing orange, partially frosted glass obscures our view of the development behind, shifting our attention to the graffiti and trash that have already blemished the stop. In this and other images, Godow’s focus on details removes context and underscores the generic, universal quality of materials, suggesting that well-funded urban renewal leads to well-funded sameness. In other images Godow probes cultural stereotypes by depicting a shiny purple ski mask or two ice skaters printed in cyan, one wearing a sweater emblazoned with a skull. In another diptych he captures different, partial views of a historical black-and-white photograph mysteriously taped to a new, paper-covered window pane smattered with neon paint. Like Godow’s depiction of bent signs directing visitors to Oslo’s oldest monuments, this pair of images suggests that history itself is being somewhat disregarded.

Godow makes images that expose order and chaos, design and spontaneity. He specializes in injecting surprise and delight into the depiction of inanimate materials until his photographs activate us to consider a location through its less celebrated details, to use intriguing information to envisage a city transformed. Although Godow occasionally suggests dark undercurrents beneath the glittering facades, ultimately his dynamic images provide a distinctly optimistic view of Oslo — a city bathed in northern light.

2 Oliver Godow, email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2019.

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OSLO 2014–2019

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Y-blokka by Katja Høst is a set of 24 black-and-white postcards depicting the iconic modernist building, the Y-block, which formed part of the Norwegian Government Quarter for over fifty years. The postcards show the building scarred by the bombings, addressing the lack of historical awareness in cultural policies allowing the forthcoming demolition of this major monument to the Norwegian welfare state. The postcards will be distributed for free across the city.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

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KATJA HØST (b. 1972, Norway) holds a degree in photography from Bergen Academy of Arts and Design. Although her work includes landscaping, relational aesthetics and video, photography remains prominent in her production. Social structures and practices, as well as identity, are recurring themes in her work, posing open ended questions as to how we define ourselves and govern our lives, as individuals or as a community. Høst has exhibited in a wide range of spaces in Norway as well as abroad and produced public commissions and projects for the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH), Litteraturhuset in Oslo, Oslo Central station and in the suburban area of Haugerud/ Trosterud (in collaboration with Liva Mork).

What decides whether a building is worth protecting?

Katja Høst’s project for osloBIENNALEN is a series of postcards portraying a building threatened with demolition in the Government Quarter: the ‘Y-block’. Over the past few years, debate has raged as to whether the block, designed by Erling Viksjø with decorations by Carl Nesjar and Picasso, is to be torn down or preserved. According to the arguments in favour of demolition, the Y-block is difficult to protect against fresh terror attacks; it is ‘grim’ and ‘brutal,’ and does not meet today’s utilitarian needs. But even before the terror attack, the Directorate for Cultural Heritage argued that the block should be protected. The arguments in favour of preserving the building declare it a rare example of the Brutalist style of architecture, and a unique monument to the age of Social Democracy.

Although Høst’s photographs of the block show traces of the terror attack in 2011, it is not the bombing that is her main subject. Equally, she wishes to raise questions about the meaning of collective memory, and how it is perpetuated. In earlier work, Høst has portrayed among other things the Folketeater building in Oslo, where the Opera was housed for decades before it moved to Bjørvika in 2008. Both the Folketeater building and the Y-block are examples of Social Democrat institutional building in the modernist style. Such buildings often involved the demolition of city neighbourhoods. Some people still read the buildings as examples of violence against an earlier era.

Others see buildings which have now aged and acquired historical and cultural value. The answer is here – in the cards.

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Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen NORWEGIAN AUTUMN Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen is a Norwegian historian and writer, and specialist in recent French, German and Norwegian culture and history of ideas. In this essay he situates Erling Viksjø’s buildings in the Government Quarter in a Norwegian architectural history characterized by conflict.

Equality is not a uniquely Norwegian or Scandinavian characteristic. Historically, the differences in income and wealth have been as great in Norway as in other European countries; this is true whether you look at the Viking era or the nineteenth century.

Scandinavian equality emerged from the struggles of the labour movement around the middle of the 20th century. In the 1920s, less than a century ago, British newspapers warned their readers against what they called the ‘Norwegian condition’, that is social paralysis resulting from bitter class struggle and endless strikes and lockouts. But then Norwegian society changed. Incomes policies came into place wherein wage rises and labour conflicts are regulated through negotiations at a national level involving the organizations representing labour, capital and Governmental expertise. This uniquely Scandinavian system of governance has led to small differences in income, consistently low levels of unemployment and high rises in productivity.

A generous welfare state was built, with free education, health services and universal benefits.

The housing market was regulated, and ‘Husbanken’ (The Norwegian State Housing Bank) enabled most Norwegians to buy their own homes. The Golden Age was the Gerhardsen epoch after World War II. Capable social governance and a strong collective project defied society’s ‘law of gravity’ and created an unusually egalitarian society. But as early as the 1980s, inequalities began to increase again. Equality is not a law of nature in the Nordic countries.

Hammersborg in Oslo is where you best sense the way in which modern Norway was forged amidst the struggle of conflicting interests. Take a seat on the stairs in front of the Deichman building and let your gaze wander! You are sitting surrounded

by Trinity Church from 1858, the Deichman Central Library (opened in 1933) and the ‘Y-block’ from 1969. The aesthetic contrasts are stark. All three buildings were built as proud expressions of the State and the democracy of their time. Nevertheless they dislike, indeed even hate, one another.

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In the nineteenth century, Hammersborg, the small hill above Oslo, was given the nickname ‘the Norwegian Acropolis’. The so called Public Servant state (embetsmannstaten) of that era built a hospital there and located three churches on the hill: the Trinity Church, Saint Olav’s Cathedral and the Johannes Church. The style and materials of the churches marked firm affiliations with a Lutheran culture with its centre in northern Germany. The churches – including the Roman Catholic Saint Olav’s – are in red brick, like those in Lübeck, Hamburg and Danzig. The style is Romantic-historical, influence by Gothic. The Public Servant state was governed by a self-assured educational elite with cultural and often also personal links to Denmark and Germany. All the churches were designed by German-born architects: Alexis de Chateauneuf, Wilhelm von Hanno and Heinrich Schirmer.

After 1884, a new political system was adopted with parliamentary rule and political parties. The ‘Venstre’ (‘left’) movement that dominated the state from 1884 was a national-liberal movement with brave ambitions for public education. The state apparatus grew, and important buildings were added to the area by the hill in the middle of the capital. The Supreme Court was finished in 1903, designed by the Norwegian Hans Jacob Sparre.

Three years later came the present-day Ministry of Finance, designed by Henrik Bull in the Art Nouveau style. According to the plan, the building, which was given a distinctly national look, was only to be the first wing in a large, H-shaped government building at Hammersborg. In 1921 the construction of the Deichman Central Library began as a temple of knowledge on the Norwegian Acropolis. None of these projects were completed. In the case of the Deichman building, a long row of columns that ends in nothing recalls a construction process that was discontinued in 1933, when the budget had been spent and Neoclassicism had long gone out of fashion. The national-liberal bourgeois regime functioned badly in Norway. Historians have viewed this in the light of the fact that the commerce-based bourgeoisie lacked the capacity for national leadership. The Norwegian business community was dominated by the shipping industry, and some of the leading political figures in these years were shipping magnates. This was true of the three prime ministers Christian Michelsen and J.L. Mowinckel from Bergen, and Gunnar Knudsen from Porsgrunn. But the shipowners were weakly rooted both nationally and in the capital.

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Following Jens Arup Seip’s famous lecture From The Public Servant State to the One-party State, the history of Norwegian democracy is customarily divided into three ‘regimes’: the Public Servant state from 1814 until 1884; the bourgeois multiparty or Liberal state from 1884 until 1935 and the Social Democratic order or Labour Party state from 1935 or 1945.1 I use the word ‘regime’ here, as do biologists, to indicate a relatively stable dynamic system. The Labour Party assumed power in two stages, in 1935 with Nygaardsvold and following the Liberation in 1945 with Gerhardsen.

The ‘Eagle among political parties’ retained power for a generation. With ‘Høyblokka’ or H-block (the Highrise Cabinet Building) and the Y-block, an overall plan for the Government Quarter was conceived in accordance with the architect Erling Viksjø’s drawings. Here, as in other areas, the Social Democrat order demonstrated vigour and the ability to govern.

1 Following 1814 independence, much of the personnel of the multinational kingdom of Denmark stayed in place, constituting a social elite among the “natives” of Norway. The term embetsmann in 19th century Norway denoted an exclusive group of higher civil servants, university professors and judges. These top level public servants enjoyed legal privileges ensuring their autonomy from politics (they were tenured for life and could not be dismissed), and for decades they dominated both parliamentary debates, the cabinet and social life, due to the prestige of university education.

It may be instructive to understand the concept of the “embetsmannstat” in light of Max Weber’s and later Fritz Ringer’s analyses of related social strata in 19th and 20th century German society as “mandarins”.

KATJA HØST

The will to conserve has been weak at Hammersborg, something which is perhaps related to the fact that this is the locus of power in Norway. As Aristotle pointed out in antiquity, statecraft is a matter of kairos – that is, of observing the times and finding the right moment to act. Each regime has wished to mark the hill above the capital with its vision and its view of what constitutes the good state and the good life. Some of the mandarin Public Servant state’s finest buildings were demolished to make room for twentieth-century buildings.

The Johannes Church disappeared in 1924; the ‘Empire (Regency) style District’, designed by Christian Grosch early in the 1800s, was torn down to make room for the H- and the Y-blocks.

The Trinity Church, which is one of Norway’s most monumental, was allowed to stand. But the Deichman building steals space from the church and pushes it out onto a crossroads while at the same time the refined green surfaces of the Neoclassical library make the pious red brick of the church seem shoddy. The Y-block takes up all the space over which the Deichman was meant to hover, and with its modernist forms creates a stark but interesting contrast to the two older buildings.

No, Norwegian nation building is not all harmony., The Trinity Church and the Deichman are important Oslo buildings. But they are not significant buildings in the international context. There are neo-Gothic churches and Neoclassical libraries in most major cities. Viksjø’s Government Quarter, on the other hand, is unique. Only Oslo has this architecture with this type of decoration.

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It is now the autumn of Social Democracy. The Government Quarter was built to give material form to the most important collective project in Norwegian history. Soon it is to be demolished and replaced by a new government complex that will have even larger dimensions and transform the physiognomy of Oslo even more radically than Viksjø’s complex did. According to plan, the demolition of the solid Y-block, which survived the 22nd July attack almost unscathed, is to start in October 2019. The H-block is said to have been saved, after intense mobilization of resistance.

But this is a mirage. As a landmark and symbolic building it will vanish, surrounded as it will be by massive office buildings of the same height as the H-block. So that it will not disappear entirely, additional stories are to be added to the building that once towered over Oslo. It is not the first time that Viksjø’s masterpiece has been maltreated.

The first storey of the H-block was walled in so that the building no longer hovered in the air.

In 1990 two floors were added. This meant the disappearance of the organically sculptured top storey with the famous elevator house and cabinet hall. The much-maligned box shape was something the government building only took on as a result of successive rebuildings. The restoration after the terror attack might have provided an opportunity to restore the building to its original beauty and originality. Instead it was once again transformed in a way which deprived it of character, reducing the monument to a plain high-rise.

The two wounded giants still stand on Norway’s Acropolis. They are ghost buildings within which forgotten stories and dreams meander. If we are to learn from them, we must open them up by asking questions. The buildings were functional, but they were also representative, created in response to an apparently insoluble paradox: how does one create an enduring monument to an antimonumental culture? Never was the rhetoric of power so timid as in the Gerhardsen era.

This was the generation that built a new society, rebuilding the country after the war. ‘Objectivity’ and ‘precision’ were the watchwords in a textbook for the philosophicum university entrance exam by the philosopher Arne Næss, which appeared in 1947 and which for thirty years marked the gateway to Norwegian universities. Viksjø and Gerhardsen disliked monumental architecture as fostered in the totalitarian states of the time 58

by Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. At the same time both architect and contractor wished to mark a distance from the US-style ‘corporate aesthetic’, as represented by Mies van der Rohe’s officeblock architecture. Viksjø met these challenges by using sober, clean lines, low-key, integrated decoration and a unique choice of materials. State power was not clad in marble or glass and steel, but in sandblasted ‘natural concrete’, a brand new building material that Viksjø and the engineer Sverre Jystad had developed and patented. River gravel from the Hønefoss region was mixed into the cement. The artistic decoration was sandblasted into the concrete, thus achieving a distinctive tactility. The art is not on the surface, it resides in the body of the building and invites you to touch it. In order to realize this entirely untried type of decoration, Viksjø engaged the artists Carl Nesjar, Inger Sitter, Odd Tandberg, Tore Haaland, Kai Fjell, Hannah Ryggen and Pablo Picasso.

Without remuneration of any kind, the worldfamous Picasso continued his collaboration with Nesjar and Viksjø until the Y-block was finished in 1969, and radically influenced the Government Quarter with his art. The veteran avant-gardist and socialist must have been deeply fascinated by this vision of art in an indissoluble unity with working life and architecture. The construction process began in 1956. Labourers and artists worked side by side, floor by floor. Despite, or because of, the fact that the budget was modest and the state thrifty, in 1958 the Norwegian Government could already move in. Everything was thoroughly thought out. Government and state administration did not simply move into a new building. The whole interior was specially designed in the modern style: office chairs, chairs for meetings, writing desks, meeting tables, door handles, lamps and light fittings.

The post-war era was a heyday for Norwegian and Scandinavian design, and the radical nature of the aesthetic revolution at Hammersborg enchanted its contemporaries. Such an organic unity of art, design and architecture had not been seen in the Western World for centuries. Architectural critics invoked parallels with the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of antiquity.2 The artists were fully aware that it was official buildings they were decorating. The motifs are abstract or universally human, the design style buoyant, light and subtle. Picasso set the tone. Even Hannah Ryggen’s tapestries are more dreaming and utopian than polemical. The building is the message.

Viksjø’s Gesamtkunstwerk is about democracy rooted in hard work and popular involvement, the national in interaction with the international, and about technically sophisticated governance. The H- and Y-blocks do not pay homage to utopia and hardly even to progress; they are rather a homage to the tools of progress – that is, to intelligent and rational governance. The H-block’s screen-like facade is a compliment to the working methods of bureaucracy, to graph paper and filing cabinets. In 1969, the H-block found its match in the Y-block, this too built in natural concrete and decorated by Nesjar and Picasso. The H-block’s firm rectangle resonates with the low-rise office building’s extended and elegant curves, forming an indissoluble unity.

2 Christian Norberg-Schulz, quoted in Hugo Lauritz Jenssen's excellent construction history of the H-block (Oslo, Press forlag 2014, p. 102).

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Katja Høst’s postcards with motifs from the Government Quarter comment on the ahistoricism of Norwegian cultural administration as manifested in the treatment of Viksjø’s Government Quarter.

They point to a lack of historical awareness in policies that have allowed the demolition of this major monument to Norwegian modernity, ironically fulfilling the terrorist’s intention. How can one permit the demolition of a unique cultural monument that exemplifies the scope of modern Norway’s history and experience so thoroughly?

Other countries celebrate their cultural heritage with postcards and postage stamps. Norway tears down its monumental buildings. Høst has eschewed the usual approaches to architectural photography intended to aestheticize. Here we see no wide-angle shots, blue skies or bright colours.

She takes us close to the gravel of the natural concrete and displays its tactility. The low-key, documentary style of the photographs is in keeping with the aesthetic that is documented. The same goes for the filing-cabinet-like presentation in postcard racks.

In their shy monumentality, the H-and Y-blocks recall a state that had a soul. The long rows of identical offices express both equality and individuality. In Gerhardsen’s Government Quarter each bureaucrat and politician had an office and its size was fixed almost independently of rank.

Some lines in Norwegian history and culture, which are much older than Social Democracy, culminated here: Lutheran modesty, a sense of duty and trust in the state as a problem-solver. When you sit on the stairs, you can imagine that behind each window a bureaucrat is working quietly away. During the lunch break, silence is broken by sandwich paper rustling and low-voiced conversations about speed skating records and long cross country ski hikes, and about weekends in wood cabins, the kind without electricity and running water, as far as possible from the crowds. It will not be like this in the new Government Quarter. Today’s bureaucrats have to take their place in open-plan offices with cubicles and the odd meeting room, and they will be organized and motivated in line with organizational doctrines imported from the model nations of the market economy .

Since Friedrich Hegel gave his lectures on aesthetics in Berlin in the 1820s, we have known that art and architecture express the historical life of mankind. They give enduring form and expression to the thinking, sensibility and political projects of the age. In the past year, the Norwegian construction directorate Statsbygg has filled both the mediasphere and the city space in Oslo with models and simulations of its planned new Government Quarter. How does the Solberg state wish to appear? What kind of power is unfolding here? What can we as citizens of the Norwegian state learn about the order of which we are a part from studying these prospects?

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Erling Viksjø’s Government Quarter is a pure winter landscape. Viksjø built Norwegian mountainsides, buildings made to function, shaped by the climate and realities of the Northay. Katja Høst takes photographs of buildings that are alive but may soon die. She photographs the monument as process, as durée or duration in the sense of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s. This is architectural photography that highlights the irreversible, transformative force of time.

But with the data manipulations of Statsbygg and the competition winner Urbis, we take a fictional tiger leap out of time into an eternal early summer in which the sun always shines on the Government Quarter, where the lawns are green and the trees are always in bloom. Apart from its unusually dense and massive structure, the project resembles a typical international office complex. Five thousand work stations – corresponding to a whole small Norwegian town – are crammed into a block set in the tight street grid of central Oslo. Asat the former airport Fornebu, individual buildings have been given unusual, digitally created forms that suggest a connection with a placeless digital culture of knowledge. Gerhardsen’s Government Quarter has a frank, transparent expression. Solberg’s Government Quarter, however, adheres to a digital culture that masks functional ‘hardware’ with human-friendly ‘software’. The steely monsters are covered with green turf, and in the photographic simulations the largest office buildings Norway has ever seen are placed in what appears to be an inviting park milieu. But the green patches are to serve as air vents for the thousands of bureaucrats inside and will be muddy and icy for much of the year.

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Does the Solberg state have a soul? Is the new Government Quarter anything more than a place where global capitalism can stop over? It is difficult to detect a clear identity in the project.

The highrises could house almost anything and be from anywhere. No mark of participation in the nation as a democratic project can be detected.

The green roofs fail to give the intended nod back to the turf roofs of National Romanticism –the shift in scale from hay barn to Government Quarter is too absurd. Instead, the project’s disturbing dimensions remind us of the source of funding, which is the ‘Oil Fund’, and that this is Norway – nouveau-riche Norway. Membership of the Government Pension Fund (Global) is the new collective project. It is where we belong.

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Filmmaker Javier Izquierdo presents a new documentary film produced by osloBIENNALEN, a film about a film about a book about a city. The film takes as its point of departure the Danish film adaptation of the Norwegian modernist novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun, published in 1888.

Through conversations with an array of Norwegian writers, filmmakers, psychiatrists, artists and more, Izquierdo investigates the impact of both the film and novel on generations of Norwegian culture and artistic practice, while exploring how it could speak about what it means to be an artist today.

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JAVIER IZQUIERDO CRIMES OF THE FUTURE: A FILM ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A BOOK ABOUT A CITY

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JAVIER IZQUIERDO (b. Quito, 1977) is a filmmaker who has written and directed the documentary Augusto San Miguel ha muerto ayer / Augusto San Miguel died yesterday, about the pioneer of Ecuadorian cinema, the mockumentary Un secreto en la caja / A secret in the box (Best Latin American director and FIPRESCI prize in BAFICI 2017), and found footage film Barajas, about four Latin American writers who died in a plane crash in 1983. Izquierdo is interested in unveiling unknown artistic figures, exploring the frontiers between documentary and fiction and giving new use to archival footage.

What is the crime of the future? Javier Izquierdo has made a number of films about authorship and books. For osloBIENNALEN he has made another about the filming of Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger.

The book from 1888 has a powerful first-person narrative voice, a starving author who drives the internal monologue of the story forward. In the 1966 Danish film version, Henning Carlsen used the modernist film idiom of the time – stark contrasts of light and darkness, still images, unexpected dramaturgy – to transform the monologue into action. Izquierdo’s film presents a succession of Norwegian writers, film people and others to discuss the impact of the book and the film on Norwegian art and culture. The film also visits historical places which today have disappeared or are almost unrecognizable. Much of Carlsen’s film was shot at Vaterland in Oslo. In 1966, the demolition of this neighbourhood was still at the planning stage and Vaterland was still intact.

Izquierdo has made a film about a film about a book about a city that has now partly been torn down and rebuilt.

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CRIMES OF THE FUTURE: A FILM ABOUT A FILM ABOUT A BOOK ABOUT A CITY. FILM STILL

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Roskva Koritzinsky MY FIRST MASTERPIECE Roskva Koritzinsky is a Norwegian writer and critic. She debuted in 2013 with the short story collection Her inne et sted (In here somewhere).

Her third book, Jeg har ennå ikke sett verden (I haven’t seen the world yet) was shortlisted for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2018.

Koritzinsky both writes about, and is one of the interview subjects in, Javier Izquierdo’s film Crimes of the Future.

In the essay Human Personality from 1943, the French philosopher Simone Weil writes: “When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestations of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible [....] But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved [....] [The artist’s] personality has vanished. Truth and beauty dwell on this level of the impersonal and anonymous.

This is the realm of the sacred.”

— This summer I met the Ecuadorian filmmaker Javier Izquierdo on a park bench in Oslo. Crimes of the Future was underway, which revisits Henning Carlsen’s film adaptation of Hamsun’s Sult (Eng. Hunger) made in 1966. As a writer living in Oslo, invited to write about the film, Izquierdo asked me to participate in it too, 129 years after Hamsun’s alter ego walked the streets starving.

Izquierdo’s filmography is characterized by a fascination with the myth of the artist. Underpinned by three lines of enquiry – geographical place, the Zeitgeist and the individual creator – his work necessarily poses questions about the interrelations between them.

In his documentary, Augusto San Miguel is dead (2003), Izquierdo set out to uncover traces of Ecuador’s first filmmaker, an artist who later sank into oblivion and along with him a large part of the story of Ecuador as a filmmaking nation.

Barajas (2017) is a video collage of found footage of the four great Latin American writers who died in a plane crash in 1983 on their way to a writers’ conference in Bogotá. The title of the film is the airport in Madrid, located close to the spot where the crash took place.

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But the film that best encapsulates Izquierdo’s interests is the carefully-made mockumentary A Secret in the Box (2016) about the fictive author Marcelo Chiriboga. A literary genius and part of the Latin American literary boom (alongside the better-known Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez), he was later forgotten, not to say surpressed. The author’s books are exploited, with more or less justification, as tools in the struggle for Ecuador’s future. His figure diminishes in tandem with Ecuador – a country which in this fictional universe is made to suffer an even harsher fate than it did in reality – until the day when both the country and the author are wiped off the map. The film consists of clips extracted from a TV interview, said to be the only one the author ever gave, and conversations with family, old friends, publishers and fans. It paints a humorous, albeit disturbing, picture of how the heroes of yesterday can become the ghosts or scapegoats of tomorrow. In this way, it explores the interactions between art and politics, strategy and coincidence, myth-making and history-writing, the little life and the grand narrative.

Izquierdo seems to be more curious about the stories and imaginations that we – the readers, spectators, members of society – create about a person when confronted with his/her artwork, than the artist's actual biography.

Reading between the lines, the artist's (and the artwork’s!) fragile, paper-thin quality is indicated; she/he becomes a projection and so no one. Even the existence of her/his oeuvre is undermined.

Subject to a process of continuous negotiation, their status is destabilized. Changing notions about the kind of tasks that constitute the artist’s metier mean that what is declared an eternal truth at one moment is pushed out into the cold the next. Names that seemed carved in stone vanish from one day to another – not only the name but the stone too.

—

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As I write these lines, it is now August. I have recently seen rough footage of Crimes of the Future. In a few weeks it will be finished, but by then this text will have been in print for some time. Javier and I are, in other words, each sitting in our own place on the planet tying to articulate the content and meanings that run through the film, what it might become and how it might be read. This is a pertinent undertaking considering that Izquierdo’s special interest is in the uncertain and unfinished quality of the work of art.

Even the title, Crimes of the Future, is a small kôan in its own right. It is taken from one of the protagonist’s articles-to-come, but neither the film nor the novel tell us what crimes it refers to.

This is one of several gaps in Hunger. Others are the name Ylajali, or the sentence that the protagonist repeats in an attempt to attract her attention: “You have lost the book, Miss! You’ve lost the book!” We are compelled to fill in the gaps, to enter unknown territory and attempt to tie up loose ends, but we remain unsure as to what kind of intelligence to apply.

What does that scene mean? asks Izquierdo.

I don’t know, I reply.

And I still do not know. Perhaps there is no logical, or for that matter medical or psychological, explanation. That does not mean that the question should not be asked. Perhaps it reveals a great deal about itself, a kind of flickering lamp, blinking alone in obscurity.

— As we know, Knut Hamsun was preoccupied with what he called “the unconscious life of the soul”; a state of mind that only sensitive, responsive and troubled people experience, and which most people would call madness. He himself called this “far from abnormal [...], neither dream nor reality; it is a moment imbued with an unconscious sensation of affinity with nature.”

JAVIER IZQUIERDO

A moment of revelation, we might say. Or oneness of being. At all events, it reeks of the spirit and the eternal.

The film director Anja Breien, a member of the Hunger crew in 1966, and who also appears in Izquierdo’s film, describes how seeing the film again brought new insights. “I was surprised to see how Per Oscarsson played the main character as being on the threshold of madness,” she says.

Here she touches on something interesting: what happens to a novel consisting of one long internal monologue when it is portrayed on film? What do the director’s filmic choices tell us about the interpretation of the material, and what does this reveal about the mood and concerns of an era – its view of humanity, art and the world?

There is one scene in particular that I have to single out. The protagonist’s article has been accepted. He is ecstatic, and enthusiastically scribbles a message to posterity: “Here I wrote my first masterpiece.”

This scene is not in the novel. True, the protagonist has heard a comment by the editor of the newspaper publishing the article - “written with talent.” He is “foolish with joy.” He raves through the streets at night repeating: “Written with talent, in other words, a little masterpiece, a stroke of genius!”

There is a clear difference between repeating something to oneself and committing it to paper.

The difference is small but significant. By choosing to write down the phrase - words uttered alone, at night - “foolish joy” becomes a written message.

With this act, the protagonist of Hunger makes an almost imperceptible move away from collectivity, falling further out of step with the norm. Further away from the usual: self-absorbed, would-be author, Instagrammer or supermarket cashier.

A little less like ‘one of us.’

This is not to say that self-absorption and its cousins should be passed over. In Crimes of the Future, the psychologist Finn Skårderud describes Hamsun’s alter ego as an image of the modern human condition: the neuroticism, the self-discipline, the quest for meaning and self-realization, the longing for love, the grandiose self-image.

This makes me think of Simone Weil again. Ironically, the French thinker – she was schooled and well read in so many fields that it would be silly to reel them off here – died of hunger at the age of 34.

At least so the myth says.

An important theme in Weil’s work was how human beings fulfill their mission on earth (and become one with God) by adopting a kind of total silence or concentration, a condition that one does not seek but receives. In this state it is possible to make contact with the so-called ‘impersonal.’ The impersonal, as I understand the concept, is closely related to what Buddhism calls the Buddha-nature or non-self: a state in which the ego – with all its longings, aversions, preferences, uncertainties, ruthlessness and pleasures – ceases to be, whereby the subject comes into contact with ... well, with what exactly? With the force that created the universe, the lifespring, the falling away of all illusion. Or in Hamsun’s words: an “unconscious sensation of affinity with nature.”

One of Weil’s arguments is that we cannot know what is good or true without first having experienced this state. In other words, we cannot discover what is good or true by thinking (or shaming ourselves into knowing); we will always be coloured by the ego, rather than God or nature. In other words, we cannot escape from ourselves, our bodies, our humanity. It is a state that we may experience but cannot consciously seek.

Writing is one of several activities that can open the doors on the experience of transcendence. At the same time, the writer is often vain, preoccupied with self-presentation and feedback, or her/his knowledge of the world, with others and her/ himself. And so the fate of the writer is, as a rule, to remain trapped in the ego – whether covertly or not.

Either he mumbles to himself at night, or writes on a wall.

— Writers, psychologists, historians, critics, reader – no-one owns Hunger. The dialogues in Crimes of the Future delineate the protagonist, but he constantly defies all attempts at definition. He is both mad and brilliant, an artist and a mediocre impostor, a victim and a self-harmer, a man of integrity and a liar, a representative of the zeitgeist and a human being.

And Hunger? It is about physical hunger, existential hunger, the longing for confirmation, the longing for God. It is about poverty, megalomania. It is a portrait of a time and a portrait of a city, a novel about an artist and about an epicrisis.

And perhaps too, it is about the pain of experiencing a moment of affinity with all that lives, only to meet one’s own reflection in a window pane a second later.

Crimes of the Future: A film about a film about a book about a city. Film stills

—

The section on Simone Weil is based on the foreword

by Sian Miles pp. 1-67 and the text Human Personality pp. 69-80, from Simone Weil – An anthology, Penguin Classics 2009.

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For his project, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E), Norwegian artist Alexander Rishaug has conducted sound recordings in the Norwegian government quarter. The recordings were made over two nights in October 2017. The work can be seen as a sonic portrait of the abandoned building’s current state of haunted emptiness, an emptiness which connects to the events of July 22, 2011. For osloBIENNALEN, the recordings will be released on a double LP. The project was carried out in collaboration with Hagelund / Christensen and with the support of KORO / URO.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

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NEW IN DECEMBER 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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ALEXANDER RISHAUG (b. 1974, Oslo, Norway) is a sound artist and composer working in the field between art and experimental music. Rishaug creates site-specific sound projects that investigate time, memory, space/place and acoustics through the use of extended field recording techniques and advanced speaker technology, analogue synthesizers, computers and generative sound manipulations. As an active solo artist and frequent collaborator, this has led to numerous performances and projects within the field of sound art, contemporary music, visual art, film, dance and theatre.

How does the silence sound after a bomb? This is just what Alexander Rishaug investigates in his work for osloBIENNALEN with sound recordings captured in different spaces in the high-rise building ‘Høyblokka’ in the Oslo Government Quarter. When Norway suffered a gruesome terror attack on 22 July 2011, it began with a bomb in the Government Quarter. Naturally enough, it is the subsequent massacre on the island of Utøya that has been the focus of attention for most people ever since.

The Utøya massacre claimed more lives, the victims were young, the killings bestial. But the material destruction in the Government Quarter was devastating. From one moment to the next, buildings were laid waste, and the two blocks were evacuated. What fills Høyblokka now is a silence that surpasses its spatial dimensions, a silence that speaks of a before and an after. We can only imagine the number of different sounds that filled the Brutalist office buildings in its life before the bomb exploded: the murmur of voices, the rustle of clothing, the tap of shoes, the snap of document files, fingers tapping on typewriters and keyboards.

Decades of sounds accumulated and imprinted on its fabric. Rishaug’s audio recordings, released as eight tracks on vinyl LP, are the sound of a silence, a reminder of both earlier human activity and how it ceased.

ALEXANDER RISHAUG

Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E)

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Tore Stavlund THE HAUNTED EMPTINESS OF ABSENCE – A SONIC PORTRAIT OF HØYBLOKKA Tore Stavlund is a literary scholar and project manager at Aschehoug Undervisning. He has written about music and literature in a variety of magazines, anthologies and catalogues. His latest book was Melk. En romodyssé (Milk.

A Space Odyssey), Cappelen Damm, 2016.

Everything to do with the terrible events of 22 July 2011 is difficult. Approaching what happened opens a Pandora’s Box from which all horrors and pestilences come tumbling out, and it takes courage to hold the box open long enough for Hope to slip out in the end. So let us narrow the context down and go straight to the starting point for the audio artist and composer Alexander Rishaug’s work Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E): the psychoacoustic landscape in the empty Høyblokka as it stands today, tottering above the Government Quarter – a monumental memorial to the persistence and perhaps also helplessness of the bureaucracy.

There is a before and an after: the lawyer and author Aina M. Ertzeid was at work on the eighth floor of Høyblokka when, on a summer-still Friday, late in the general staff holiday period, it was subjected to the terror attack. In the novel 15:25,1 she writes about how difficult it is to reconcile oneself to what happened. In the book she also describes the inner life of Høyblokka. She depicts bureaucrats and caseworkers, department heads and ministers, their intrigues and disagreements, their work initiatives and their festivities. Apparently a normal office environment, but also a part of the officialdom surrounding the political power centre of the country. The massive building of 56 meters and seventeen floors, designed by the architect Erling Viksjø and constructed in ‘natural concrete,’ has, since its completion in 1958, housed the Office of the Prime Minister on the five upper floors and the Department of Justice on the others. Ertzeid writes: “On the top floor the Government met for conferences, state visits were received, and the magnificent view of the city was shown.” On that fateful Friday, however, little was happening.

She is to work for one hour and then exercise [....] Her gym bag stands ready at the door [....] She hears a glass being put on the kitchen unit, efficient footsteps across the corridor and someone shouting something. A couple of offices away two colleagues are having a conversation. The dishwasher is running.

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Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E)

In the drowsy quiet of the office landscape, the sound of everyday trivialities is borne effortlessly through the corridors. But then: A deep boom. A wind rushes through the space. The building is lifted up and dropped down again. Something bumps against her stomach. The windows creak. A bang. Dust everywhere. In her mouth and throat. She can’t see. A pain in the chest. She can’t breathe. Is it poison? Gas? Is she going to die now?

Interior photo from H-Block

She manages to get out in the stairwell: The fire alarm pierces the building [...] shrilly echoing through the empty stairwell [....]

Shattered concrete. Ruins. Cables and broken pipes hang from the ceiling. In towards the reception area everywhere is dark. The outer walls have been blown away.

Outside, the Government Quarter has been turned into post-apocalyptic chaos. There are shattered windows everywhere. Papers are floating down from the sky. Eight people have died, six of them were employed in the building and were in the entrance and reception area on the first floor, while two people were chance passers-by, nine are seriously injured and hundreds have been affected mentally or physically. And at this point we are not counting the inconceivable events on Utøya. But we are not going there. We will stick to Høyblokka.

Eight years later it stands there like a scrapedout shell, cleared and con-demned, stripped of all power. In October 2017, Alexander Rishaug was given permission to spend a couple of nights in there with his recording equipment. I can imagine him wandering around in desolate corridors equipped with microphones in search of Høyblokka’s psychoacoustic state. Now and then he comes to a halt and sniffs, searches with his ears for almost inaudible sounds, lowers small microphones down into piping systems or inserts them into cavities, attaches contact microphones to surfaces, lets them listen to what the ear cannot register. Documents the resonance of the building, its comatose breathing.

Rishaug is part of a tradition of audio art with its origins in the works of the Canadian composer and audio theorist R. Murray Schafer, whose book Our Sonic Environment and The Soundscape. The Tuning of the World from 1977 is a central work in the ecophilosophical tradition of making recordings of audio environments. It was necessary, Schafer thought, to preserve authentic sound environments, both urban and rural, and thus contribute to a wider understanding of how sound environments evolve over time. A relevant example in this context is the Spanish audio artist and ecologist Francisco Lopez’ recordings from the World Trade Centre in New York,2 made in February and March 2001, that is, not long before the terror attack in September, in which recordings from machine rooms, elevator shafts and ventilation systems form the raw material for a sonic portrait of the buildings – not that the recordings were meant to be an authentic representation. Lopez categorically rejects the idea that a sound recording is just a representation of its source, and argues that it is an independent creative act with an autonomous result. Had it not been for the conceptual contextualization in the presentation of the recordings, the listener would not have been able to link them to their sources.

2 Francisco Lopez, Buildings (New York), V2_Archif, 2001.

Ertzeid, Aina M, 15:25, Oktober Forlag, 2019.

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We can say the same about the concrete results of Rishaug’s work with Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E), a vinyl LP release with a suite of eight tracks, each lasting exactly eight minutes.

All the tracks open with silence before a gentle white noise is allowed to grow, becoming louder and louder until it has achieved an all-encompassing presence, which then fades out again. Through the name of the work – a combination of the Y-block’s “Y” and the coordinates of Høyblokka – and the track titles – prosaic references to the time and location of the recordings – time and place provide the formal premises for the compositions.

There is, all the same, nothing about the resulting soundscape that in itself points directly back to its origin. For example “Høyblokka – Kitchen, 17th floor, 07:31, 29.10.17” includes no sounds we would associate with a kitchen. Nor is there anything in “Høyblokka – Prime Minister’s Office, 06:35, 17th floor, 29.10.17” that conjures up images of the Prime Minister’s office early in the morning.

This is where we find a twist in the work. We are induced by the prosaic titles to fill the compositions with expectations of something recognizable, only to realize – not without a shudder – that these expectations will never be fulfilled. For what is to be found in Høyblokka if not absence and emptiness?

Precisely. And it is a doubly haunted emptiness.

Haunted on the one hand by life as described in Ertzeid’s novel about the officialdom of power, and on the other by the eerie reminder of the evil that moves among us and what it is capable of.

It is this haunted emptiness that Rishaug has brought out and presents to us in his sonic portrait of Høyblokka.

Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E)

Sound environments change over time and should therefore be documented for posterity, R. Murray Schafer argued. And this is what Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E) does, in that the work absorbs Høyblokka’s psychoacoustic state. It is a timely piece of work. For soon this state will become historical. In a few years, the administration of Norway and the Prime Minister’s Office will be back in the block, and with four new floors to its disposal, while the Y-block, is scheduled irrevocably for demolition.

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The artist filmmaker Knut Åsdam presents an episodic film called Oslo, that will evolve over the coming years. Fragments from the first episode will be premiered on screens across the city at subway stations and other places of transit.

The source material for each episode is stories and observations of Oslo, which form the core narrative of the work and are structured in ways similar to how people make up their own narratives in everyday life, often from seemingly unrelated moments. A full version of the film will be presented in 2024.

NEW IN OCTOBER 2019

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KNUT ÅSDAM (b. 1968) is a filmmaker, artist and writer. Åsdam studied at Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (NYC 94-95), Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht, 92-94), Goldsmiths College (London, 89-92), and other institutions.

Through cinema, video and installation, Åsdam’s work looks at contemporary society, its psychological and material effects, and the toll of everyday life; e.g. how individuals adjust their identity and desires in reaction to the rules and organization of contemporary society. The idiosyncrasy of Åsdam’s films is created by drawing attention to space, history and place in film, combining this with an acute sense of subjectivity and language and a mix of documentary and fictional narrative elements that drive the plot.

How do you make a ‘different’ Oslo film? Visual artist and film-maker Knut Åsdam, at the invitation of osloBIENNALEN, is producing one such film.

The expression ‘Oslo film’ is often used to describe long scenes of public spaces in Oslo, where typically well known landmarks play a central role. The characters are often created so that one can easily see how they are situated geographically, economically and socially. Sometimes it seems as if there are fixed rules about how Oslo is portrayed on film. The city spaces have become pure cliché, where characters are easily identifiable and you feel that you have seen it all before. Åsdam’s film will not be like this. The film will take its starting point in unexpected situations, characters and locations – in a multi-purpose hall in Maridalsveien, on wasteland by Akerselva river, a train depot at Alnabru and a container port. Add to this the fact that the film is being made in stages over five years; it will be shown in various versions up to its completion in 2024 and screened in various public places around Oslo – places where you would not usually expect to see a film.

KNUT ÅSDAM

OSLO

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Aina Villanger FILM-MAKING FRAGMENTS Aina Villanger is a poet and writer. She has published several books since her debut in 2012. In 2019, she was awarded the Stig Sæterbakken’s Memorial Award. In the following text, she approaches Knut Åsdam’s film project Oslo through conversations and an email exchange with the artist, fragments from the screenplay, studio visits, and observation of a day’s filming.

1. film: OSLO Director: Knut Åsdam Producer: Knut Åsdam Studio/osloBIENNALEN 2. starting question (e-mail to knut re text): Something about how a film-work by Knut Åsdam is made?

3. quote, knut (answer to e-mail): I work quite freely on the basis of the ideas that gave rise to the film. I suppose you too should be quite free to write on the basis of what the project is/can be.

4. quote, shooting plan: Thursday 1st August 2019 (shooting day 2) UNIT CALL: 08:00 Location: Vulkan multi-purpose hall, Maridalsveien 17, 0175 Oslo Parking: Vulkan car park Cast: Birgitte Larsen (Z) and Eva Johansson (X) Stunt man: Diego Belda Estimated lunch time: 12:00 Estimated wrap: 16:00 Sunrise: 03:59 Sunset: 22:41 Weather forecast: Sun, 22 C 5. quote, script (scene 12): Props: bags, keys – personal and to hall Birgitte’s knife, “Eva’s” set of throwing knives (double set 2 x 3 knives)

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6. shooting (on set): “We’re rolling!”

“Sound on!”

“Action!”

There are twelve people on the basketball court when I arrive, but as soon as they hear the order, half of them disappear. A small crew, as Knut said. I’m allowed to sit on the grandstand, which gives me a bird’s-eye view of the stage: one director, one cameraman, two sound people, one production assistant, and two actresses in front of the camera– one short-haired in sporty work clothes, the other with pink-dyed hair in a large black denim jacket. A Swedish caretaker and a Norwegian crane operator. Both women. X stands fiddling about with a hose. Z approaches, I hear fragments of the dialogue: Z: “Do you need help?”

X: “You have to manage on your own.”

Z: “How much do you earn here?”

(Helps to pull the big hose over the floor) X: “But the job is fine.”

“Fine,” says Knut. The crew come out onto the floor from various places; one member takes over the large camera that the cameraman has over her shoulder, another comes and adjusts one of the actresses’ hair, another comes and gives Knut a message, another stands back a little and observes. “That was really fine,” says Knut. “I think we should do another take, close up,” says the cameraman. “OK,” says Knut, “We’ll do that NOW!” “There goes lunch,” says someone else. They go through the scene once more. It takes maybe eight minutes. Is this a short scene?

What came before it? What is Z doing in here in X’s workplace? And who is X? I’ll have to ask Knut later, I think. Then someone shouts: “Now Diego’s here!” The production manager tells us to keep moving.

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7. quote, knut (phone): I’m interested in the role of the physical. People doing physical work.

8. quote, script (scene 13): Z starts throwing knives, at a board or post. Details of hands. Concentration. Physical. Quick throws.

Hits. (The knife-thrower throws the hits).

9. shooting (on set): We go out of the hall, at the back, to a spot just by the river and the roaring waterfall, beneath a staircase structure next to a fenced-in ball court.

What kind of place is this, actually, to make a film in? The back of a sports hall in the centre of Oslo?

I look at Diego, the stunt man, who is throwing knives at a wooden board on a tray leaning up against a post. Again and again he throws them one by one. The three knives clatter to the ground.

Now and then, one of them sticks in the wooden board. Sometimes two. Once, all three stand quivering in the board. I take a look through the camera. A close-up of the three knives slung at the board. Bonk. Bonk! Quiver! When the stunt man has done his job he can leave – along with his daughter, who’s been sitting in a corner and waiting with a drawing pad. Now Z and X are to throw the knives. The camera points at the face and hands. “Action!” First Z throws. Throw, fetch.

Throw, fetch knives. Then it’s X’s turn. Throw, fetch. Why are they throwing the knives? I’ll have to ask Knut later. I hear Knut say, “OK, we’ll go for the next one.”

10. quote, knut (phone): I like problematical characters.

KNUT ÅSDAM

11. shooting (on set): We wait outside the Vulkan car park. A production assistant appears with more coffee, nuts and fruit.

The camera arrives. The actresses arrive. A car pulls up. The sound people arrive. Now everyone is here. The make-up artist says that being on set is a regular alternation between a lot of waiting around and suddenly being very busy. “Ready?” asks Knut. Is Z’s hair maybe a bit tousled? Is she supposed to look so tired? And then the makeup artist runs up to the actress in front of the camera, pulls her hair slightly back behind her ears, straightens her jacket a little, before slipping imperceptibly out of the camera’s field of vision.

No, it seems they weren’t ready. We wait a bit more. The cameraman and the assistants adjust some camera things. They change something. Now the other actor is waiting too. This is very funny, the make-up artist says, and different from the film industry. Here the script comes last. “Sound!

Action!” X drives the car out of the car park. Z stops her outside. They talk together through the window. What are they saying now, I wonder? X drives out of the parking area. Z stays behind. “OK!” Knut and the cameraman are talking. We wait a little. Now Knut waits for a while too. Someone is fixing something. And then they can do another take of the scene. I’ll have to ask Knut about the dialogue in the car later.

12. quote, knut (interview, kunstkritikk 2015): The essence of the film is not what they say; it’s more the relationship of language to a world that is changing. For example questions about whether they have any possibility of influencing these changes.

14. the project (project): The visual artist Knut Åsdam is making Oslo.

With the help of the Oslo Biennial. A film that can perhaps be called a growing project in three stages. The first part of the work will be presented in October: fragments of the film are to be shown on monitors set up in various waiting rooms around Oslo, such as Metro stations, health clinics, perhaps the waiting room for the Nesodden ferry at Aker Brygg wharf? The next two stages are to be shown later on, in other ways – perhaps in two years time, perhaps in five, depending on the funding situation. The work is supposed to result in a full-length film developed on the basis of the two preceding stages, but not necessarily as a direct continuation of them.

15. quote, knut (phone): This process is quite different from the other films I’ve made. Only I know what we’re going to film.

16. quote, script (scene 14): Z meets V. Talks to him. (Will probably be shot on Friday) V doesn’t really want to talk. Tries to avoid Z. Z starts talking anyway.

Z: What are you spending your time doing?

V: What are you doing down here? Shouldn’t you be sitting a bit higher up looking down at the rest of us. I’m at work.

Z: ... M/B, is he here? I’ve handed in my notice.

17. visit, åsdam studio: Knut shows me unedited footage from other previous shoots. In a folder there is an enormous digital file with every single shot neatly sorted according to the time of shooting. The sound is out of sync. So you look through all the shots and choose the one you like best? That must take a very long time? Knut talks about the work while he searches back and forth through the shots.

We see a large container port – Oslo Harbour.

We see the character Z, the same person we saw in the sports hall, and a new character, called M/B. Why does he name his characters just with letters? We see Z driving up in a car, while M/B moves crates in an open container. Z is insistent.

M/B is more evasive. M/B leaves Z with some odd, apologetic gestures. This is probably scene 15.

What kind of universe is this actually?

19. quote, knut (phone): The absurd has a place. Realistic dialogue may seem surrealistic.

18. quote, script (scene 16): The container has been set a little aside by the people who work there. The firm that shipped it or was to receive it went bankrupt – the warehouse rentals and transport costs have never been paid.

The employees have long since broken the lock and opened the container, and have begun to help themselves to what was inside. With some hesitance, because every one knows this isn’t quite legal.

21. And what is the film actually about? I seem to have forgotten to ask Knut that.

20. visit, åsdam studio: Knut shows me shots from a different scene. A different work area not far from Oslo, at Alnabru – shot from above, from a large crane. We see Z sitting operating this enormous piece of machinery, high above the hill. We look out over a warehouse area with sheds and containers, just by a train line.

Asphalt, steel, concrete and other construction materials are being moved here and there by the huge crane arm. Z grips the levers. The crane swings around. A 360-degree view. Silent, moving images. Raised high above all the others. What does a crane operator think about in the course of the working day? What is the crane operator actually doing here?

22. quote, oslo (monologue): This city changes more than people can control.

Evening shot. Z comes out to the port where M/B is. She drives a little farther out into the harbour area. M/B stands by the container, busy clearing up and carrying things in and out.

Z: Isn’t it a little too late for that kind of work?

Did you begin by importing?

13. quote, actress (on set): I’ve known about this for a year. This way of working suits me very well. We were given the final manuscript last night, and for me most of it is about here and now, about being present. I must know the text, of course. (Goes and fetches the script.)

M/B: This may be (something else), a hobby for example – the sort of thing you do after work.

Can’t you stay here for a while? I’ll be back in no time. I’m just trying to get something fixed before Armageddon. To be a little prepared. (Punches the telephone keys). Don’t touch anything.

Z: Armageddon? (....)

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ONGOING FROM MAY 2019 JULIEN BISMUTH INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

CAROLE DOUILLARD THE VIEWERS

ED D’SOUZA MIGRANT CAR

METTE EDVARDSEN TIME HAS FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN OSLO COLLECTED WORKS OSV.

HLYNUR HALLSSON SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS

MÔNICA NADOR / BRUNO OLIVEIRA ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO

ROSE HAMMER NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

LISA TAN OTHER ARTISTS

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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Julien Bismuth’s Intet er stort intet er litet (Nothing is Big Nothing is small) is a performance series inspired by political street theater and a quote from the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch: “Nothing is small Nothing is big.” A group of performers move through the city, voicing the same text in diverse contexts and public spheres.

ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

JULIEN BISMUTH INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

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JULIEN BISMUTH (1973, France) is a French artist and writer who lives and works in New York. His practice is located at the intersection between visual art and literature. Bismuth’s work ranges from performance, video and photography, to sculpture and drawing, and has been shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunsthalle Vienna and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Bismuth is also co-founder of Devonian Press along with designer Jean-Pascal Flavien.

Does it ever happen that you overhear fragments of conversation as you move around the city? That you suddenly notice an isolated phrase spoken by a stranger? Someone saying something that wasn’t meant for you but which makes you think?

A fragment of conversation can turn your day upside down. At the same time, you may sometimes nod and pretend to listen to a conversation in which you are taking part, without taking in what is being said. Julien Bismuth’s project for osloBIENNALEN is a performance in which five performers are assigned their own texts, which they learn by heart. They will meet in the morning, before splitting up and moving around the city alone, performing their texts all over the city. They might utter the words to themselves as they walk or sit. Or say them on the telephone while they are ordering a hot dog from the kiosk, or to the person walking beside them, who might also be a perfomer. They will perform their fragments of text over the course of the day. At the end of the day they meet again outside of the National Theatre and perform the text one last time. As the performance ends, the texts, like any other fragment of conversation, will remain in the minds of those who happened to overhear them.

(The title is inspired by a diary note by Edvard Munch, “Nothing is small nothing is big”).

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

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Ellie Ga OAR OF WORDS, RUDDERS OF SPEECH Ellie Ga is a writer and artist from New York currently living in Stockholm. Following a conversation with the artist, she writes about Julien Bismuth’s project intet er stort intet er litet (Nothing is big nothing is small).

We speak our way through a city and often become the accidental audience for others who speak their way. We overhear snippets of conversation and people talking through headsets – like a dialogue with one side missing. On rarer occasions people turn and address us directly. Like Julien, I don’t wear headphones when I move through a city. I like to catch fragments of sentences – balloons snipped from the string of private conversations.

Julien is writing a series of texts for performers to speak while walking through Oslo. Some of the performers will be in dialogue with one another.

Others will walk alone. They will stop to speak their texts as if talking to an invisible audience – a theatrical aside – a break from the ongoing play of life. Other performers will turn to address the accidental audience surrounding them at any given moment. As the performers speak their way through Oslo, they end the performances where they started. A circumscribed path.

In her collection of essays Sidewalks (Papeles falsos), the writer Valeria Luiselli paraphrases Wittgenstein in comparing language to a city, always under construction: with historic zones, modern areas, spaces in the process of renovation, bridges and silent streets. In Julien’s performances, the city itself is a metaphor for spoken language, a summation of historical drift, ebbing and flowing in order to remain current, to remain spoken.

Julien’s texts include riddles and fables, jokes and anecdotes and ekphrastic descriptions of images.

He writes with a constellation of references in mind – Norse literature, current events in Oslo, travel writing about Norway – and he generates a community of ruminations. What are the equivalent of runic inscriptions today? How can we create a confluence between the enigmatic Prose Edda or the Rune Poems and the world of the Oslo-dweller, while we negotiate signals from street traffic, cell phones, and others who join in conversation?

I like walking in cities where I don’t understand the language. I like not being able to understand the conversations that surround me. I like the music of foreign speech. Not music as speech or speech as music but the music of speech: its tones, its notes, its rhythms.

Its silences.

While writing the texts that will be spoken by actors as they walk through Oslo, Julien has drawn inspiration from the use of riddles in works such as the Norwegian Rune Poem. According to the scholar Thomas Birkett, there are several stanzas in the Rune Poem that allude directly to the shape of the rune on the page.

I wonder to myself: What does it mean to read something that refers to its own shape and sound?

As I read Julien’s texts, I keep returning to this question, especially as I think of Julien’s previous work. On the metal gate of a storefront in Los Angeles is a mural by Julien called See Me Sea. The mural reproduces a page from a used 1920s handwriting manual. Shaky ‘genuine’ handwriting, in blue, follows the smooth flowing lines of ideal handwriting, in black. The shaky handwriting is trying its best to follow along. But it deviates. The sentence being spelled out is ‘See Me Sea’. The line of esses – repetitions of the cursive letter s – looks like a series of waves, or sails disconnected from their boats. The flowing handwriting below – with a billowing s and gliding lines – connects the letters so that they merge with the horizon.

The handwriting becomes a picture and the picture refers to what is being written: the act of seeing the sea. Up, down, up, down, the s-sails moving along the horizontal plane of the schoolbook. When I say the sentence out loud, ‘see me sea’, the shape of my tongue produces a sibilant hissing sound that looks like the handwriting on the metal gate.

In one text, a narrator describes the particles that cover a city and its dwellers – from sprinklings of sugar on a fresh pastry to sprinklings of snow on a newly arrived visitor. Another entry in the series describes the joy of not understanding the language we overhear on the street in a foreign city:

INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

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Julien says that while reading the skaldic poems and the Prose Edda, with its riddles and disconcerting humor, he has become enamored with their formal constructions, in particular the ‘kennings’. Kennings are embedded in Old Norse and Old English texts.

A kenning is a type of a circumlocution, a spoken phrase that circles round an object, a name or an idea.

Instead of naming a person, place or thing directly, the narrator speaks around it using other words.

‘Oar of words’ …or…

‘Rudders of speech’ …are kennings for ‘the tongue’.

In addition to drawing inspiration from some of the earliest preserved forms of the English and Scandinavian languages, Julien’s own perambulations in Oslo and his readings of Norwegian literature have helped him to generate a portal for the narrator to fall through in the performance texts. For example, one of Edvard Munch’s written sketches is transformed into a runic script on the back of a traffic sign: The inscription was written in black paint marker, like graffiti, on the back of a traffic sign indicating the presence of a town on the left. The letters looked like sticks. Broken sticks, clumsily rearranged. The phrase said: “nothing is big nothing is small” Or those were the words that came to mind when I looked at it. As if the scrawled signs had spoken.

In Sidewalks, Luiselli writes that a city has its holes. Sometimes we literally fall into holes in the pavement. Other times we use our imagination to fill in the holes—the gaps between buildings, between translations, as we think in one language while surrounded by another. Often the narrators in Julien’s texts fall into word-portals that no one else appears to understand. Take, for example, an excerpt of a text that Julien pasted on building facades throughout the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca.

JULIEN BISMUTH

Imagine that you are the only person who can read this text, the only person it speaks to and who speaks for it…you just happened upon it and happened to be able to read it.

Is this like peering into the mind of Oluf Opsjon, the Norwegian immigrant who tried to convince the world that he had discovered runic writing in Washington State in the 1920s? Julien sent me a newspaper clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle, dated 11th July 1926. The clipping includes a photo of Opsjon sitting on what looks like a forest floor, holding a slab of stone for the camera.

It’s an image of a felled tree, “a tree felled by lightning on the ancestral farm” is the caption under the image […] At the base of the tree, embedded within its roots, is a large stone slab […] The slab is covered with inscriptions, but the inscriptions are illegible.

This text is part of a series where Julien uses random images and text messages received by phone for a series of ekphrastic writings.

Ekphrasis is the detailed description of a scene, more specifically a work of art, but in contrast to the classical Greek urns and easel paintings that are often the subject of ekphrastic poetry, Julien applies this form to the quotidian experience of scrolling through a smartphone. As a performer walks through Oslo, inspired by low-resolution photo attachments, ekphrasis is broken down to its original word blocks: ek + phrasis = out + speak.

Julien – I say – have you ever read the poem Musee des Beaux Arts by WH Auden? I remember reading the poem in high school literature class as an example of ekphrastic writing par excellence.

Auden’s poem describes a painting by Breughel called The Fall of Icarus. A farmer and a shepherd walk down a road, and the sea dominates the right-hand side of the painting, but in the lower section of the sea, human legs are sticking up from the water. It’s Icarus – having flown too close to the sun. In the poem, Auden writes that Icarus’ failure isn’t important enough for anyone in the painting to notice. Like the farmer and shepherd, with their backs to the sea, one of the actors in Julien’s performance will speak the following words while walking down a street in Oslo.

INTET ER STORT INTET ER LITET (NOTHING IS BIG NOTHING IS SMALL)

Many are the day’s eyes. I am turning to face you but your eyes and your ears are turned elsewhere. Many are the day’s voices. My ears were once large enough to sleep in, but my eyes have always been this small, this focused on this or that thing. Many are the days, and fewer are the nights.

Fewer and shorter.

I say to Julien that I worry. When the performers recite their texts, or when they turn to address a passer-by, will the ears of the audience be elsewhere?

You know – I say to Julien – everyone is walking around with those funny white sticks coming out of their ears. Talk about broken sticks clumsily arranged. Your texts about fables and runes and kennings and myths and dust and snow – spoken by performers while walking through the city of Oslo – are like wings in the corner of a painting.

But then again – I say to myself – is the success of public art measured by its noticeability as literature, performance or intervention?

Julien’s performers will be walking in Oslo over the next five years, talking in fables, riddles, jokes and ekphrastic descriptions that you – the accidental audience – might just overhear. The actors will join a flow of speech in the comings and goings, ebbs and flows, of words that are launched across the city. Julien’s texts will slipstream into a delta of speech. Words, phrases, snippets released.

Language in a city, like a city unto itself, with its dead-end streets, historical developments, gentrification and segregation, resistant to containers and navigated by resonance, all with the sibilance of a speech rudder.

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Carole Douillard’s project The Viewers is an outdoor living sculpture. A group of diverse people stand motionless and stare at passers-by in busy city landscapes.

ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

CAROLE DOUILLARD THE VIEWERS

CAROLE DOUILLARD (1971, France) works with performance. She is most often described as “using her body as a sculpture” and also produces representations, such as drawings and photography, that explore mental states and patterns relating to her artistic practice. Douillard lectures and participates in research projects and publications around themes of performance and the situation of the body in public and institutional spaces. She has presented her work and public commissions both in exterior public spaces, art institutions and theatre spaces.

What’s in a look? If someone stares, you stare back, don’t you? Or do you look away? In public space standing and looking is often synonymous with exposing yourself to being looked at. Standing together in a group might grant you power, but at the same time it makes you vulnerable because you are more visible than yourself alone. Carole Douillard’s project for osloBIENNALEN is about exactly this: a living sculpture made up of a group of people who stand still and look at passers-by or a point in the urban landscape. And there they stand – for a long time. Where and when they do this is agreed in advance. They stand together, silent, attentive, contemplative even. If you take the time to look back, you might recognise the individual ways that ‘the viewers’ are enacting their personal and collective presence. To stand in front of a crowd is something not many people are comfortable with. At the same time, there is something hypnotic about looking, and being looked at profoundly. If you pass a group of people on the street who are clearly looking at you, do you look back?

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

PERFORMANCE LOCATION

EKEBERG PARK FROGNER PARK GRØNLANDS TORG JERNBANETORGET THE NOBEL PEACE CENTRE THE OPERA HOUSE TORSHOV PARK UNIVERSITY SQUARE THE Y-BLOCK THE YOUNGSTORGET SQUARE BIRKELUNDEN STATUS

ONGOING UNTIL OCTOBER 2019, WILL EVOLVE

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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THE VIEWERS. FRONT OF NOBEL PEACE CENTRE/OSLO CITY HALL, AUGUST 2019

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Manuel Pelmuš WHAT DO THE VIEWERS SEE? Manuel Pelmuš trained as a choreographer; he lives and works between Oslo and Bucharest.

His work reflects on the experience economy, production values, strategies of disappearance and the politics of visibility in our media-driven society. In this essay, he interprets Carole Douillard’s The Viewers and its potential as a political act.

As The Viewers slowly take up their positions in a public space in Oslo, let’s say on the roof of the Opera House, they know they will be standing there for a long time.

Time, taking time, having time, wasting time, time to think, time to look, time to be together.

Time is a luxury most of us can no longer afford.

From this privileged position, in a privileged country, they use their time to look around.

At first glance, everything looks quiet. The landscape is beautiful and serene.

As they look further into the landscape they stumble upon an area of newly built high rises blocking their view. Privatised public spaces turned into luxury apartments and corporate offices. They zoom in, in an attempt to look closer.

In 2016, in London, in the immediate vicinity of Tate Modern, the new inhabitants of luxury buildings felt disturbed by visitors having access to the upper terraces of the museum. They complained that their privacy was being violated by the curious gaze of people inside a public institution. They filed a lawsuit against Tate Modern.

Public space seen as a threat to private interests.

Looking too close. Getting too close. Being too close.

Public gaze getting too close to private affairs becoming an offence.

The Viewers insist on looking from a public point of view. Their gaze is constructed collectively as public scrutiny of current affairs.

As The Viewers stand still and hold their formation, their bodies stand in alliance with other bodies in formation, past and future, in the streets, in the squares, laying claim to space as public space1.

Contesting the strict division between public and private. They embody a plurality that reconfigures public space, actualising and producing anew memories of other bodies assembling throughout history. Keeping these memories (a) live and projecting them into the future.

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They stand close to each other. For each other. With each other. Holding ground. Holding it together.

Holding on. Holding on for others. For others to join.

In 2013, in Istanbul, a man arrived in Taksim Square with just his backpack. He chose a spot and stood still for hours, hands in pockets, gazing towards the Ataturk Cultural Centre. He returned to the same spot every day and spent several hours in the same position, claiming space with his body at a time when public assemblies were forbidden in the city.

As his body and his action started spreading across time and (virtual) space via rumours, media, and other bodies, people started to join him. One by one, copying his posture, looking together in the same direction. His body becoming many. Many becoming one. His gaze a collective gaze.

Repeating, replacing, supporting one another as a living network of solidarity. Re-imagining the public sphere. Mobilising an ongoing dialogue between their presence, passersby and social space.

In 1977, Croat artist Mladen Stilinovic made his iconic photography series entitled Artist at Work, in which Stilinovic is pictured sleeping in his bed in eight different positions with his eyes open or closed. The performative immobility of these sleeping positions scrutinizes the ideology and politics of work.

Stilinovic makes an ironic criticism of the western artist’s obsession with productivity and work. In his manifesto, The Praise of Laziness, written in 1998, he mocks artists’ obsession with “production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects,” and praises the virtues of “staring at nothing, non-activity, dumb time”.2 The Viewers stare back at the pervasive predicament of our neo-liberal times and its infatuation with round the clock activity and the depletion of resources this condition imposes on us and on the Earth.

The Viewers stand for others, in alliance with others’ struggles. Mediating different historical moments of solidarity and forms of assembly.

Recirculating collective memories and the politics involved in the representation of these memories.

By standing still The Viewers insert another temporality into the time of the city and of the passers-by. A different intensity into the regular pace of the crowd. Their immobility stands in stark contrast with today’s requirements of being productive and efficient at all times.

1 Judith Butler, Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2011.

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Grønland Torg, June 2019

But maybe The Viewers see something else that prompts their stillness. Maybe their refusal to move or act is connected to a deeper understanding of our present historical and political predicament.

Maybe their stillness constitutes a suspensive response, proposing other modes of re-thinking action during pressing political times.

2 Mladen Stilinovic, “The Praise Of Laziness”, Moscow Art Magazine nr. 22, 1998.

CAROLE DOUILLARD

In 1992, a curious series of still-acts were performed by several choreographers gathered for a monthlong choreographic laboratory at Cité Universitaire in Paris, as noted by dance theorist Andre Lepecki.3 The well known Portuguese choreographer Vera Mantero refused to move during one live event stating that “the political events in the world were such that she could not dance.

Stillness as political action. Acting still. Stillness as an act of resilience.

What if The Viewers are standing still in order to see better. To keep an eye on things. And by paying close attention they make us more attentive.

They look down from the North on how desperate and underprivileged people running away from wars and famine are blocked from reaching our continent in safety. On how our dismantled borders are reappearing in ever greater numbers. On how nationalist melancholia has again become the spectre haunting Europe. On how we divide ourselves more and more into a few rich and many poor. On how public space is increasingly instrumentalised by undemocratic private forces.

Today public space must be addressed under new conditions of pressure exerted by a neo-liberal world view.

The Viewers keep looking and standing. But for how long will they be able to do so? The temporality of the public confronts the temporality of the private.

The Viewers’ gaze also becomes an economic gaze.

Under today’s increasingly precarious living conditions one should affirm new forms of solidarity.

With and for the commons. With and for the people standing on the streets all over the world holding the powers that be to account.

The Viewers are quiet. This quiet immobility stays with us. Their muted presence produces a performative suspension of what may follow.

Will they start shouting? Will they simply remain?

Will they start marching? Will they be joined by others? Will they make demands? How long will they stand there? And why?

In 2014, Yves Citton wrote his book entitled The Ecology of Attention. He analyses the politics of attention from the point of view of today’s pervasive economy of attention. Citton argues that attention must be understood as transindividual: neither individual nor collective but manifest at the point where both the individual and the collective are constituted. Attention, like affect or desire, is a point where the most intimate individuation intersects with collective conditions and relations.

By shaping and designing attention, we construct and transform the way we care and pay attention to one another collectively. “An attention ecology,” Citton argues, “can create the conditions for new collective intelligence.”4

3 Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement, Routledge, 2006.

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Jason Read, The New Inquiry, 18 December 2014.

THE VIEWERS. OSLO CENTRAL STATION, MAY 2019

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Migrant Car is a collaborative project between Ed D’Souza, Eddie King’s Furniture and Upholstery Workshop and students from Oslo Metropolitan University and the Oslo Academy of the Arts. From May to August, a reconstruction of the Indian ‘people’s car’ the Hindustan Ambassador was moved around Oslo’s new car-free zone. Migrant Car has provided the basis for a number of artistic contributions by and in collaboration with students from KHIO and OsloMet. In the spring of 2020 Migrant Car will start its journey north towards Kirkenes and Russia, making a first stop in Bergen in collaboration with Kunsthall 3.14.

ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

ED D’SOUZA MIGRANT CAR

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

TEMPORARY SCULPTURE AND PERFORMANCE LOCATION

OSLO INNER CITY STATUS

THE PROJECT WILL CONTINUE IN OTHER CITIES

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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ED D’SOUZA (Robert E. D’Souza, 1969, UK) is an artist, designer and Professor of Critical Practice at Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton, based in London. He is known for his temporal, site-specific and participatory/ collaborative art and design projects many of which connect to his Indian heritage. His work explores critical practices that engage with a variety of production processes and producers and is supported by his critical writings around social, political and cultural change. Recent projects have been shown in art institutions, biennials and public spaces in China, India, Spain and the UK.

How far can a wrecked car move in a car-free city? Ed D’Souza’s project for osloBIENNALEN is Migrant Car, a sculpture in which a three-dimensional photograph of a crashed car reproduced in full size is wrapped around a wooden framework built in a joiner’s workshop at Markveien. The ‘car’ is rolled about to different places in Oslo. The photograph of the crashed car was taken in Delhi, India, where the artist found the abandoned wreck.

The car is a Hindustan Ambassador, a model in production from 1958 to 2014, which was the car in India, popular as taxi, as status symbol, in time becoming a people’s car. Notorious for its bad brakes, many of them ended up as wrecks in a country famous for the rampant growth of its traffic and car culture. Motoring is a global phenomenon, but the cultures surrounding it vary.

In Oslo there is now a political majority in favor of a traffic-free centre, involving the disappearance of private cars from the city streets. There are many borders in the world that cannot be crossed by car because of power struggles and political manoeuvres. Maybe this car brought from elsewhere will remind us of this.

ED D’SOUZA

MIGRANT CAR. IN FRONT OF NOBEL PEACE CENTRE, JULY 2019 / OSLO CITY HALL SQUARE, AUGUST 2019

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Denis Bocquet THE CAR-FREE ZONE Denis Bocquet is a Professor of Urban and Architectural History and Theory who researches, among other things, the history of urban planning. In the following essay, he writes about Oslo municipality’s urban environment initiative “Bilfritt byliv,” which had a special significance as the backdrop for Ed D’Souza’s project.

MIGRANT CAR

Following decades of policies that have tended to facilitate access by car, contemporary efforts to reduce the spatial imprint and environmental impact of traffic in city centres are becoming a marker of progressive urban policy. Oslo has gained international attention thanks to its dedication to this ambition, by trying to combine innovation and creativity in order to invent a new form of urbanity, in which diminishing the space allocated to cars, their parking and circulation is seen as a vector of liveability enhancement. Bilfritt Byliv (car-free city living), due to its combination of practical measures and social and political thinking, is among one of the most interesting among such experiments worldwide. The quality, focus, coherence and ability to foster debate that this initiative is displaying are useful to many cities, and have been acknowledged internationally.

Some potential ambiguities however, are worth addressing critically as part of the stimulating and thought-provoking debates the initiative is promoting.

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Between the 1960s and the 1990s, pedestrian zones were a kind of mirror of the modernist ideal of the separation of movement flows. Pedestrian streets, or portions of streets, counterbalanced the more numerous spaces in which cars had been given priority and had even been made a strong determinant in basic planning choices. From Rotterdam to Rouen and from Montréal to Darmstadt, such pedestrian spaces, partially protected from the urban ubiquity of cars, were abundantly served by surface and subterranean parking spaces, and were in no way elements of car traffic reduction.

On the contrary, their economic function, explicitly negotiated with local associations of shop-owners, was to attract more motorized customers into city centres. Pedestrian zones were part of the autogerechteStadt (car-friendly town). In the early 1990s, the Italian experiment at creating ZTL (zona a traffico limitato; limited traffic zone) implemented by the city authorities in Bologna, Florence, Rome, Turin and Milan symbolized the emergence of a pioneering vision that set out to tackle the question differently and to pursue efforts to reduce traffic. But in spite of technological innovation for monitoring entrance gates, fewer cars in tiny medieval streets are still too many, and in the absence of massive investments into public transport, the prohibited cars have often been replaced by other individual means of transportation such as scooters, thus relativizing the effect of the measures. Systems based on taxing access, as in Singapore or London, while contributing to a reduction in traffic congestion, have not always been linked to a process of reducing the space allocated to cars. Their influence on urbanity and liveability is limited. Fewer cars circulating in the same space might be positive for the reduction of air pollution but not necessarily for the invention of a new urbanity.

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Eddie Kings Workshop, Markveien, Grünerløkka, May 2019

Based on different principles, many French cities, from Grenoble to Strasbourg and Nantes to Bordeaux, have implemented tram networks, which are not only a tool of mobility but also constitute a strategy for reducing the spatial imprint and environmental impact of cars. The construction of tram lines provided an opportunity to do away with numerous parking spaces in streets and to reduce the number of streets and lanes dedicated to private circulation. This strategy also reformed the very definition of pedestrian zones inherited from the previous period and their articulation with other urban zones. In the case of regional metropolises, it has proved efficient as a means of boosting the commercial attractiveness and urban liveability of city centres. But inventing the next step represents an obstacle that many cities have faced over the last two decades: how to eliminate the presence of private cars almost completely? How to reduce the environmental impact of deliveries? In the 2000s, Paris, through the Paris-Plage (Paris-beach) initiative, has used temporary urbanism to progressively adopt the idea of a definitive expulsion of cars from the banks of the river Seine, a measure that was finally implemented in 2018.

ED D’SOUZA

However, in the context of strong political controversies on the efficacy of this decision, the city struggles to extend the benefits of the measure into the adjacent neighbourhoods. The new urbanity of spaces without cars is not something that expands naturally into the depth of the urban structure. Barcelona is experimenting with ambitious programmes to reduce the space allocated to cars, even in ordinary residential districts, and with promoting soft modes of transport. But the city also struggles with the heritage of decades of adaptation of its urban grid to cars. In the context of mass tourism and of strong real estate market pressures, there is also the risk that any improvement of the perceived urbanity of space becomes an attack on social diversity, and so against the true urbanity of the city, in terms of combining social inclusiveness, sustainable development and liveability. In other cities, such as Tournai in Belgium or Basel in Switzerland, new versions of the dutch woonerf (living street) of the 1970s were tested. This concept, of which the city of Emmen was then a model, promotes the coexistence of cars, cyclists and pedestrians in the same spaces without an explicit hierarchy or separation, involving a process of civilization of the aggressive behaviours often induced by the modernist separation of movement flows.

Every user is supposed to take into account the presence of the others and to adapt his attitude accordingly. Such solutions, although promoting a softer approach to transport and the sharing of urban space, generally do not comprise an exclusion of cars and often constitute isolated areas within urban space. The fact of slowing and softening traffic is not always a factor of enhanced liveability. Hence the importance of Oslo as a laboratory. Hence too, the importance of examining the potential ambiguities of the model.

MIGRANT CAR

Firstly, there is the question of the quantification of energy consumption derived from the potentially positive effects of the closure of a significant area of the city centre to cars. In many cases in Europe, studies have shown that traffic is rarely suppressed and that compensations on the fringe of a zone in which a new concept applies often cancels most of the benefits in terms of energy consumption. Finding an answer to climate change requires thinking at various scales and addressing the entanglement of scales. This is also true of urban liveability in general: if climate change is the question, the answer must include more dimensions, such as the global energetic landscape, from local consumption to gas exports, and to consumption abroad for the manufacture of objects, or the cultivation of food used locally. To understand urban metabolisms we must look at the whole picture. In the case of Oslo, the present trend towards electrification of the car pool and the future trend towards the automation of driving also question the whole relationship between cars and urban space, and the very notion of urbanity.

Energy efficiency and space consumption are increasingly disconnected dimensions.

Secondly, there is the question of the social and spatial equity of measures that tend to generate selective access to the city centre. Residents already living in these areas, who in many cases already enjoy higher standards of urban service than residents in other areas, as well as greater symbolic capital derived from their place of residence, might be favoured, whereas those needing to travel towards the centre might be confronted by new obstacles. Effective measures aiming to reinforce public transport are necessary in order to avoid the risk of social segregation.

Experience shows that such measures are always difficult to calibrate and implement. Every weak point in terms of intermodal interchange, time and frequency of travel, availability and comfort is a factor in the potential failure of the whole system. Perceptions of accessibility and availability to inhabitants of other zones is crucial.

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Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, street parade, May 2019

The quality of the new spaces that are created is also subject to discussion. The examples of Amsterdam and Berlin illustrate that an intensification of bike traffic is not necessarily a factor of urbanity.

When massive, cycling, although green due to its use of muscular energy, is not a soft mode of transport anymore, and sometimes creates hard and conflictual interpretations of coexistence in the urban space. Having walkable spaces in city centres does not necessarily mean that walking as a mode of transport will increase either. Walkability too, has to be planned on a wider scale if it is to constitute a factor of energy use virtue. The relationship between public space and democracy must also be questioned. If the creation of new free seating spaces is a reaction against the commodification of urbanity, issues will arise: what about uses that do not correspond to the behavioural horizon of expectation linked to the fact of being in these new spaces? Homeless people? Members of the Roma minority? What about possible appropriations of public spaces by people whose behaviour, physical appearance, or way of dressing do not match the image the city wishes to project, or the social imaginary of the sociological, electoral base of the ruling coalition at the municipal level?

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There might be a difference between the imagery and even social imagination of areas subject to restricted access and the reality of their use and interpretation. And if there is no difference, it might be because segregation or gentrification is already happening. As for commercial attractiveness, the closure of city centres to cars will have consequences for the kind of activities that are proposed in the new traffic-free area. In terms of business, the transition is delicate, but does not necessarily mean a loss of substance. Any flight of commercial activities to the peripheries, along motorways, would however completely cancel the benefits of change, in terms both of urbanity and energy consumption. Displacements (of people, traffic, activities, nuisances, socially marginal practices) must be taken into account when evaluating change. In other words, urban liveability as a social and ecological project needs to be explored in all its complexity. Liveability is not necessarily sustainability. It is not necessarily accompanied by social and spatial equity either.

That is why Oslo’s experiment is so fascinating in the context of the collective and international quest for more sustainable and socially inclusive cities.

ED D’SOUZA

Kamilla Freyr ON CRAFTSMANSHIP, CONTEMPORARY ART AND A CAR ON ITS TRAVELS Kamilla Freyr is a PhD candidate in philosophical aesthetics at the University of Uppsala. As a researcher, she is particularly interested in philosophy as a reflective practice addressing contemporary art and art communication. In this interview, she speaks to Furniture Upholsterer Eddie King and some of his partners, who built the Migrant Car.

“Where does a work in public space really take place?”

—dora garcía1

In the course of the summer of 2019, the sculptural work Migrant Car can be found somewhere in Oslo’s car-free zone – an immigrant and visitor to a city that is attempting to free itself of cars.

This is the story of a car on its travels, an ongoing conversation with three craftsmen who took up the challenge of contemporary art.

In Delhi and Kochi The story of Migrant Car starts on the streets of Delhi. In 2012, the British Indian artist Ed D’Souza came across a crashed Hindustan Ambassador, a car with a long and interesting history. In 1957, ten years after India won its freedom from British colonial rule, production of the car was taken over by the Indian firm Hindustan Motors. Despite its British origins – where the model went under the name of the Morris Oxford – the immigrant soon became a popular car, and is still known as ‘the King of the Indian Road.’ For the artist, the wrecked car stood as a symbol of postcolonial history and the fall of the British Empire, and he began to investigate the car through what he calls photographic records. He captured images that depicted not only the car’s gradual obsolescence, but also expressions of local creativity as the car became covered with more and more graffiti.2 Ed wanted to give this photo-documentary a sculptural form and contacted the local furniture upholsterer David Jose in Delhi, who built a model of the car and covered it with textile prints of

1 The artist Dora García asked this question in her lecture “Dynamiting the notion of the contextfree, punctually-operating individual artist: Working with the collective, the durational, and the site specific” during the osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 Prologue Symposium on 27.5.19.

2 The artist later found out that the graffiti had been created by the recognized Indian street artist Daku.

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the photographs D’Souza had taken. The wreck was brought back to life and dispatched on a new journey. It also became a readymade – a found object modified and recontextualized as a work of art. The piece was exhibited in Delhi in 2012 under the title Economic Juggernaut3, and then again as part of India’s first biennale – the Kochi-Muziris biennale – in 2014, this time with the title End of Empire. Both times the car was recreated by local craftsmen, so that the work was modified in response to the context of each place and the individuals involved.

At Grünerløkka In 2019, its journey brought it to Oslo as an Indian immigrant, where the car was again recreated by the craftsmen Eddie King, Ronny Karlsen and Kristian Rosskopf in Eddie King’s upholstery workshop – a former plaster-casting factory at Grünerløkka.

This is where Eddie lives and works alongside his wife, the glass artist Lene Middelthon, who exhibits her pieces at one end of the workshop.

This is more than a workshop, it is a meeting place – Grünerløkka in miniature – where people come and go at any hour. “I open when I arrive – and close when I leave,” says a sign on the door.

When the upholsterer was recommended to Ed by the osloBIENNALEN production manager, he quickly realized that these were exactly the craftsmen and the workshop he needed. Eddie, who loves insects and as a child “dreamed of becoming a David Attenborough,” was born in Trinidad, but grew up in New York before coming to Norway in 1978. Kristian grew up in Munich but had a grandmother in Majorstuen, Oslo. He moved to Norway in 1991 and worked in travel agencies before he began to earn a living as a cabinetmaker. Ronny, who is now training to become a carpenter, but is already a locksmith, a technical inspector and a former expert witness for the Norwegian CID, must be considered the most settled of the three: “If I ever have to move away from Grünerløkka, I will have to move away from Norway,” he laughs.

He belongs to a third generation of neighbourhood craftsmen and has lived there all his life. Although it is Eddie who runs the workshop, Ronny and Kristian often help with cabinetmaking work and furniture repairs. When the two are out on other jobs, they are always sure to round off the working day with a beer at Eddie’s. As three of the very few independent craftsmen left in Oslo, in many ways these men personify the history of Grünerløkka – a neighbourhood with a long-standing tradition of industry and craft. D’Souza decided to place the car’s production process on view to the public, making his project a continuation of this local history. The upholstery workshop has big windows onto the street, so work on the car was put on display so that passers-by could follow the process from beginning to end.

One of the conversations I have with Eddie takes place beside boiling pans of potatoes, as he makes reindeer stew with Lene and a friend in the flat behind the workshop. The stew is in honour of the artist and other partners who are coming to dinner later on. “After almost three weeks ‘on display’ it feels as if the whole of Grünerløkka knows about The Migrant Car. I take it as a mark of quality that all the children who have dropped in love it – they have played with it, climbed on it and drawn on it – and refuse to leave when it is time for their parents to take them home,” says Eddie.

3 In 2012 the work was shown as part of the solo exhibition “A Show Outside India”. Documentation of the work was also shown at Tate Modern in London in 2018.

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There are high hopes for the street party that is to be held on the launch day, when the car parts are to be assembled in the workshop’s back yard and the car is to be handed over to the Biennale.

“Although I’m an atheist, I’m tempted to pray to higher powers for good weather on that day,” chuckles Eddie.

Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car in Oslo Pride, June 2019

When a friend drew a smiley face on the car, Eddie decided to give anyone who came in a felt marker so they could all mark the car in their own way – children as well as adults. When I ask Lene about the reactions they have had to the project, she replies that I’ll have to ask Eddie about that: “There have been so many people here that I’ve stopped listening to what they say,” Lene laughs.

The overwhelming interest is also evident on Facebook, where friends and acquaintances have regularly documented the process. Lene and Eddie are also the main subjects of a long article in the latest edition of the street magazine =Oslo, where they are described as local celebrities. So when osloBIENNALEN speaks of the production of the Migrant Car as a celebration of the local community at Grünerløkka, it seems to be true.

I ask Eddie why he was prepared to take on the project. He replies that he thought it seemed like an amusing job that would force him ‘out of the box’.

“I have had to apply everything I know about upholstering,” says the man who has worked in the trade for over 30 years. Early on in the process he was particularly worried about the cloth and how he could work with it. For example, what would it be like to sew by hand?

One early morning, while Eddie is still asleep, I have a cup of coffee with Ronny and Kristian.

“We’ve done a lot of furniture over the years, but this is something quite different. I hate to be pigeonholed and I’m fascinated with trying out new things and doing new types of work,” says Ronny.

To the question of whether they had any relationship with art before, Ronny replies that he has some paintings hanging at home. “My father-in-law painted some really fine pictures. He was clever.

But otherwise I have no relationship with art.”

Kristian, however, describes himself as “superinterested in art.”

“I’m particularly interested in art as a means of communication. For what is art actually? Is it a game? It isn’t just coming along with a painting or a picture? It tells a story about the person who made it, for example. And while you look at it one way, Ronny looks at it a different way. You should see how desperate Ronny gets when I start seeing things in the walls,” he laughs. With a nod of acknowledgement Ronny adds that where he just sees walls, Kristian sees pictures. “But Ronny is getting ever more creative, you know. When he starts seeing Mexicans in the masonry, I suppose you can say he is on the road to improvement,” he laughs.

What do you think about people outside the art world taking active part in a contemporary work of art?

“Incidentally, Ed was delighted when he heard how we wanted to build the car. In India, the car apparently collapsed when it stood outside, because it was made of cardboard boxes covered in a material that was not waterproof.”

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“I feel quite certain that the solutions will be different when craftsmen, not only artists, are involved in making art. As craftsmen we go straight for practical solutions: How can this be used? Is it solid enough? When Ed showed us the pictures and the video from India and we understood that the first car was made from cardboard boxes and plastic foam, and that it was transported on a trolley, we decided we had to make a fullscale car that could roll. And from then on the discussions piled up: Should we perhaps make a door, put a seat in the front, make a steering wheel, put hub caps on it? Yes, it really piled up here,” he laughs.

Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car

“One of the funniest things about this process is that Ed has given us such a free hand. The only thing we couldn’t change was the shape of the Ambassador and the material,” says Kristian.

“But then that’s also the way we are used to working,” says Ronny. “Even though a customer may have ideas about how a room should be divided up, or a wall should be set up, we’re the ones who come up with the practical solutions. How we tackle the job is up to us,” he says.

Kristian sees the freedom that the artist gives the craftsmen as an important part of the artistic concept: “And with that, professional competition comes into the picture. OK, so in India they solved it with plastic foam and cardboard boxes, but here we bloody well had to do it better.” They look at each other and have a good laugh.

“Yes, we can’t deny that. Of course not! You want to do better, and that’s presumably also part of what makes this an ongoing project. From the first day we agreed that we had to do something that would make those who came after us try even harder. We wanted to give them a nut to crack,” chuckles Ronny.

“And on top of all the rest comes the street party and everything that goes with it. In this case, it’s quite simply a totality that has to be outdone,” Kristian adds.

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They are both looking forward to seeing how this might happen if there is a next time.

What do you think about Ed viewing this project in relation to the migration theme?

“I like his thinking very much,” says Ronny. “As I see it, this is first and foremost a way of getting to know about others. True, we’re not going off to India to say hello to the craftsmen there, but I’ve seen Ed’s video and the street scene there, and I’ve read some of what he’s written. And I think it’s very interesting. I feel there’s a lot to learn from this – and I like that. I must admit that I haven’t felt much like travelling to India before, but now I feel very keen on the idea. I want to see the people and the life there – and the car itself ‘live,’ of course. If you’re willing to think it through, this is a project that brings a lot with it.”

For Kristian, the title is one of the most interesting things: “After all, it could be about something to do with biology, because foreign bodies can be immigrants, as well as people who come from different places. And then you have that bit about migration and how different nations and languages come about. Yes, there’s really a lot to this business!” he concludes.

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To other places On the opening day, Eddie’s prayer has been answered.

When he, Ronny, Kristian and Ed take the Migrant Car down to Myntgata – the bonnet full of children – they are accompanied by sunshine for most of the way. With a police escort in front and a parade of friends and acquaintances trailing after, it is exactly the party they hoped for. In the morning, they hold a party for the neighbours in the street in front of the workshop with all sorts of activities including acrobatics and a fire show with Løkka Tigers Turn and Tøyen Sports Club, go-kart racing, a skating competition organized by the Oslo Skateboard Club, and a Masala Magic cooking course.

Thanks to three craftsmen at Grünerløkka, a crashed car off the streets of Delhi has been found a new home in the context of Norwegian Social Democracy – and this time it really feels as if everyone is involved.

The car has departed, but the workshop activities continue with the Biennale logo, a vinyl text and films in the windows that document production both in Kochi and Grünerløkka.4 The furniture upholstery workshop carries on as a monument to the activities of the last few months. The car’s journey continues too. In the summer of 2019, students and ‘car attendants’ from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and OsloMet will pull The Migrant Car around in Oslo’s car-free zone, bringing it to various projects and events, all of which have something to do with migration and the city. Among other things,

4 The film that documents the process in Kochi, "Dave", was made by Robert Ed D’Souza, while the film which documents the process at Grünerløkka was made by Åshild Kristensen Foss, Ingrid Granrud Skaaret and Carina Marwell Hansen (students from the Department of Aesthetic Studies, OsloMet).

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the car will appear in this year’s Pride Parade. The public can track its progress on the Oslo Biennale website. Now it remains to be seen whether the Indian immigrant will function as the means of communication that Kristian expressed interest in. In the project “All of Norway is Talking” the car has been identified as one of the most divisive topics currently discussed by Norwegians5, and perhaps The Migrant Car takes a sidelong glance at the privileged situation that the capacity to close the city to traffic represents. Or perhaps it will draw attention to the benefits of car-free places around the city where a diverse community of different ethnicities can come together.

A crashed Hindustan Ambassador found on the streets of Delhi travels on as an idea that rematerializes in the hands of local craftsmen in different countries.

The meaning of the work changes over time in different situations and different places. The artist works with local craftsmen, local materials and in local communities where people become involved in a contemporary art project and acquire partownership of it. At the heart of the Migrant Car project is Ed D’Souza’s keen interest in cooperation and coproduction. As the poet Charles Baudelaire put it: “It is not given to everyone to take a bath in a multitude – enjoying a crowd is an art.

“One of the first things Ed said to us was that The Migrant Car was meant to bring people together,” says Eddie during one of our conversations, “and it does.”

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Morgenbladet nr. 1, 2019.

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ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

METTE EDVARDSEN TIME HAS FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE AFTERNOON SUNSHINE — A LIBRARY OF LIVING BOOKS

In Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine — A library of living books, a group of performers have each memorized a book they themselves have chosen. Together, they make up a library of living books, which members of the public can experience in one-to-one situations. osloBIENNALEN presents a selection of ‘books’ from the collection.

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

A LIBRARY OF LIVING BOOKS, A READING ROOM, AN EXHIBITION, A WORKSPACE, A PUBLISHER AND A BOOKSHOP LOCATION

MYNTGATA 2 STATUS

ONGOING (WILL CONTINUE UNTIL 2024)

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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The work of METTE EDVARDSEN (1970, Norway) is situated within the performing arts, dance and choreography. Although her work explores other media and formats, such as video, books and writing, her interest is always focused on the relationship to the performing arts as a practice and a situation. Based in Brussels since 1996, she has worked as a dancer and performer for a number of companies, and developed her own work since 2002. A retrospective of her work was presented at Black Box theatre in Oslo in 2015.

In 2010, she initiated the project Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, which refers to a quote from the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), to develop memorisation as a practice and ongoing process.

What is a book? Is it the cover, the paper, the typeface, the language type, the sentences or the words? If we turn the question around, we might ask where a book ends. Mette Edvardsen’s project for osloBIENNALEN reminds us that a book is very much a social affair. Someone has written it for you, someone else has worked on it at the publisher’s and at the bookshop; you are unlikely to be the only person to read it. Whether it’s an exciting crime thriller, a serial novel from the supermarket shelves, a poetry collection, or one of the classics, we talk to other people about the books we read. But what happens in a society where books are forbidden? Edvardsen has been inspired by the 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, the story of a society where books are prohibited and burnt – books burn at 451 degrees Fahrenheit. In the novel, people learn books by heart so they can pass them on orally. In Mette Edvardsen’s project a whole library of living books have each learnt one book by heart. The books live on in these people, and each will pass his/her book on to you if you will only listen. Because a book is much more than the cover, the paper – a good book lives on in whoever reads it, or has had it read to them.

METTE EDVARDSEN

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Frøydis Århus NON-MATERIAL LITERATURE Frøydis Århus is a theater scholar, critic and writer. In this essay she writes about Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine – a Library of Living Books as an opportunity to look at the world of literature in a new way.

Books are read so that one can remember, and books are written so that one can forget. Mette Edvardsen’s Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine is a project that allows us to turn this around. Here, books are remembered so that they can be read, and rewritten to see how one has forgotten.

With Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, a group of performers have each memorized a book they themselves have chosen. Together, they make up a library of living books. The books walk around the room, they sit on chairs, read the paper books on the shelves, talk to one another, look out of the window, ready to meet their readers.

The guests choose a book they want to read and the book takes the reader to a vacant corner or outside in the open air while they recite the contents of the book.

If you had to memorize an entire book or parts of it, one that was to become part of your mental and physical memory, which one would you choose?

Memorizing a book sounds more poetic in the English phrase learning by heart. In purely practical terms this is still a task for the brain and the memory. And indeed committing yourself to learning a book that will more or less be with you for the rest of your life is a choice you make with certain promptings from the heart. Being able to memorize an entire book depends both on personal ability and the length of the book you choose. Theoretically, you could pick Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a work in seven volumes and over 3000 pages, or the world’s shortest novel, The Dinosaur by Augusto Monterroso, which in its full length reads: “When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.”

The temporal aspects of memorizing these two novels are rather different.

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Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine — A library of living books, project space in Myntgata 2

Memorization is an ongoing activity. There is nothing final or material to be gained and the result is impossible to sell as a product. There is thus something utopian in such a venture. Since her art project started in 2010, Mette Edvardsen has invited people to memorize books so they can pass them on later to an audience through a series of events in libraries all over the world. The idea came from Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, about a group of people who, because of censorship, feel the need to preserve knowledge by memorizing books. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine is, as in a public library, accessible to everyone who wants to come and read.

“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine” was the sentence that made Guy Montag, the main character in Fahrenheit 451, stop and ask questions.

The novel describes a future dystopia, a book in the science-fiction genre about a society in deep crisis where the authorities forbid the people to read books. Montag lives in a time when the citizens’ collective happiness is thought to be attained through the absence of intellectual stimuli, knowledge or independent thought. Montag is a fireman and his job is to burn illegal books. He follows the orders he has been given, and can be read as a symbol of pragmatism and ignorance in the encounter with or as the product of a fascist regime.

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“Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine” is a quote from the book Dreamthorp: Essays written in the Country by the Scottish author Alexander Smith. This book, in addition to being a tribute to nature, is an examination of the relationship between writer and reader. He grapples with the idea that there is an elusive but intimate bond between the sender and the receiver of all literature.

It is this sentence, “Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine”, that awakens something in Montag, the fireman whose job is not to put out fires, but to start them. The simple line is revealed to the fireman just before the flames swallow the book. This makes him question his own role in the regime, and at a more personal and existential level ask whether he is actually doing the best he can with his life. It is as if he has an irrational sympathy with the book, this dead object that simply asks us to make the best use of the time we are given. The title Fahrenheit 451 refers to the temperature at which paper burns. In the story of Montag, it can also be interpreted as the point where self-criticism sets in and where he asks what he is actually achieving. This is not just a dissident book; it is also a book that encourages reflection on the times, and on one’s own existence.

Reading is a solitary affair. Visual art can be experienced collectively. Theatrical art addresses its audience, and music and film appealingly let us choose whether we want to be together or alone in our art experience. Only books insist on solitude, by engaging us one by one. Literature’s negation of the collective is relentless and books will always require time and focus in exchange for their content. The inaccessible nature of literature puts it in a special place in the hierarchy as something exalted. Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine as an idea and as an art project plays, among other things, on the implicit exclusivity of literature, as each reading takes place in a oneto-one meeting between two individuals. At the same time, this situation will also carry with it an element of performance and thus come close to more collective art forms.

METTE EDVARDSEN

By memorizing the content, these human, nonmaterial books have taken power from the book as an object and emancipated the reader. Books have been uncoupled from their physical function and the content is at the mercy of the oral delivery.

The time aspect of such a practice is possibly far more extreme than that of reading. It approaches the irrational but, as the title insinuates, opens up a different experience of time.

At present, over 80 books are floating around more or less word for word in the minds of those who have memorized them. The project has been realized at libraries in several places in the world. In the places where English is not the first language, the need for local books had arisen. The living books therefore exist in German, Italian, Arabic, English, Norwegian, French, Dutch and more. Some are in the original language, others in translation.

All are hand-picked by the memorizer, freely and without guidelines. Some of the memorizers have since written down their recollection of their chosen book as it exists in their memory.

Today this collection, with the subtitle Rewriting, amounts to nine editions. These rewritten texts are variations on the original books filtered through the selective memories that subtract and the autonomous imaginations that add or replace.

Second generation is another branch of the project that builds on textual transmission, only in oral form from a living book to a reader who wants to memorize the book. Many books have been important in the selection processes. Some of these have been considered for memorization, others are books that will perhaps be learned in the future or in other ways relate to the selected books. These are collected in a separate Shadow Library. In the years since the project began in 2010, Edvardsen has invited writers, artists, theoreticians and academics to write about the project. Some of these texts are collected in the publication Afternoon Editions, and others will come out in a new publication that will be available during the biennial.

In this small world of non-material literature, which today consists of about 80 living books, we find layer upon layer of fictional and historical figures and literary greats. In the collection we find Bartleby the Scrivener, the copyist who refuses to copy, created by Herman Melville. We also find Goethe and the story of Faust, he who refuses to realize his own limitations as a human being and is therefore tempted to bargain with the Devil. A nameless cat is also in the collection. The cat was created by the Japanese author Sōseki Natsume, and was his mouthpiece in the novel I am a Cat, depicting the upper middle class in Meiji-period Japan. We also find another nameless protagonist, the 15-year-old girl from The Lover by Marguerite Duras, who talks about love in Indo-China. Erika from The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek describes what it is like to be controlled by your own mother, and Gibreel and Saladin from The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie depict migration and identity.

Since the first book appeared in 2010 until today, nine years have passed. Today, the aforementioned Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451 is also part of the collection.

The narrators from the books, fictional or historical, are a diverse and curious gang who live dangerously there in memory. Memorizing a book is a Sisyphean task. When you have learned the sixth chapter, the third chapter is about to fade from memory.

Without continuous maintenance the nuances will disappear; with the nuances the intention will disappear; and with that the motivation; and slowly but surely the story will collapse before it fades from memory completely. osloBIENNALEN has given Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine the opportunity to take root for an extended period. In the biennial premises at Myntgata, Oslo, a circulating selection of books will be constantly present so that you and I or whoever may drop in can encounter world literature – and perhaps also time itself – in a new way.

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JAN FREUCHEN JONAS HØGLI MAJOR SIGURD TENNINGEN OSLO COLLECTED WORKS OSV.

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019

Oslo Collected Works OSV. is an art project by Jan Freuchen, Jonas Høgli Major and Sigurd Tenningen, specially conceived for osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019–2024. OSV. (the Norwegian equivalent to etc.) consists of an evolving exhibition held in a sculpture pavilion at Økern, and a series of booklets.

The booklets provide a complete description of the collection of works of art held in the public sphere in the City of Oslo.

DESCRIPTION

EVOLVING EXHIBITION IN A SCULPTURE PAVILION AT ØKERN, AND A SERIES OF BOOKLETS STATUS

ONGOING. UPDATED, OCTOBER 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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JAN FREUCHEN (1979, Norway) is a visual artist who works with sculpture, collage, publications and curatorial projects. In 2006, he founded the artist book publishing company, Lord Jim Publishing, which he now runs from his hometown, Kristiansand, Norway. JONAS HØGLI MAJOR (1983, Norway) is an architect based in Arendal. Recent works include a series of installations for the exhibition Game of Life IV: Prospektkabinettet at Kristiansand Kunsthall (2019), where he contributed four largescale installations. SIGURD TENNINGEN (1982, Norway) is an author based in Kristiansand.

Among recent publications is the essay collection, Vegetasjonens triumf er total (The Triumph of Vegetation is Total, 2015). Together, Freuchen and Tenningen are co-curators and co-editors of the publication and exhibition series, Game of Life at Kristiansand Kunsthall (2012–2020).

Ready to get stuck for a while at the interchange at Økern? No? Then we’ll tell you something that may encourage you to go there anyway. Oslo Collected Works OSV. has set up its own sculpture pavilion at Økern, and in the course of the spring and autumn they will fill it with sculptures taken from public art collections, including the Oslo City Council art collection. At first they will be showing sculptures of animals. Then the exhibition will gradually grow as sculptures with other shared features are set up in the pavilion. So the traffic-bound area at Økern will be filled with sculptures. The idea is to question what happens to art that is included in collections like the public ones OSV. borrows from. When a work comes from a collection, does it then stand alone, or will it always remain a small part of the collection? Perhaps all works have a collection within them, something bigger from which they cannot be released? What is it that hides inside the works that Oslo Collected Works OSV. presents? We will see the answer at Økern – of all places. (In Norwegian, Osv. stands for etc., which comes from the Latin Et cetera, meaning, “and the other [absent] things.”)

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

OSLO COLLECTED WORKS OSV.

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Jan Freuchen / Jonas Høgli Major / Sigurd Tenningen # 1: COLLECTION: DISPARATE FRAGMENTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF COLLECTING. WHAT IS A COLLECTION? WHERE DOES IT BEGIN, AND WHERE DOES IT END? For the first edition of OSV., Freuchen, Major and Tenningen made two booklets. #3: Zoology is a visual field guide to the exhibition, while #1: Collection is a written account of the collection as a concept. Read the full text below.

§1

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§6

The collection precedes the object and makes its appearance possible.

The boom in national collections since the close of the 1700s coincides with the entrance of the bourgeoisie onto the stage of history. Henceforth, the Princely, Imperial and Royal collections move into buildings specifically accommodated for the general public. Around 1730, the last direct heir to the Medici dynasty donated her collections to what would later become the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In 1828 the collection of paintings belonging to the kings of Saxony was handed over to the state administration and opened to the public. Two years later, Ludwig I’s sculpture collection was made accessible at the Glyptothek in Munich. At the same time, the Altes Museum opened its doors, and 1836 saw the completion of the Alte Pinakothek. In 1842, the National Gallery in Christiania (now Oslo) opened, built around Johan Christian Dahl’s private collection. Over the course of time, iconic works such as Dahl’s Hellefossen and Fearnley’s Labrofossen became part of a museum that would help the population to ‘visualize nationhood’. In such a perspective, European nation building over the following century emerged as an unintended consequence of a long­ standing obsession with collecting.

The antique temple collections around the Mediterranean have their roots in archaic burial hoards of marble, amber and bronze artefacts.

Like the grave goods, the temple treasures were meant to mediate between this world and the world of the gods. As Snodgrass drily observes, the Greek collections were also in a real sense ‘war museums’, overloaded with weapons and trophies from campaigns and conquests. It is these war collections, which in the Roman Empire are connected with imperial might, that are the precursor to the national museums of today. Like Napoleon and Göring later, the Roman emperors and the generals collected works of art from the provinces. The collections of Pompey, Titus and Hadrian were among the largest in the history of the empire.

§2 Every collection is greater than the sum of the objects it contains. The description of the collection is also part of its scope. When it is possible to describe the works individually, it is down to the fact that the collection is already present in them. This goes for existing works, as well as for ones that have been destroyed and works that have not yet materialised. Detaching a work from the collection entails expelling it in its raw materiality. In practice that would mean the annihilation of the object, but not its identity.

Since each expulsion carries with it a faint echo of the object’s origin in the collection, we cannot speak of a fallen nature. It is typical of the fetish­ isation of the individual work that it is supported by such expulsion fantasies. Hence the principle: ‘Not the work in the collection, but the collection in the work.’

§3 A quick glance at the long history of collecting, from prehistoric burial hoards and the temple collections of antiquity to the museums of today, indicates a distinct continuity. Seen from this point of view, the development of early advanced civilizations in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean does not constitute a break with earlier societies of nomads and hunter­-gatherers. On the contrary, there is a tangible link between them, something which the numerous accumulations of weapons, jewellery and tools speak to. If we go to the museums of today, we find the same continuity. Indeed, the collections are classified thematically, in such a way that the war museum’s grenade supply, and John Singer Sargent’s watercolours from the trenches are presented separately. Here a consideration for protocol divides what in times past was stored together.

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§5 In all collections there are objects that have one or more characteristics in common. When an object without any obvious common features turns up, it is easy to describe it in a way that separates it from the rest. It is this separation that constitutes the collection.

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§7 In scholarly literature a distinction is often made between (active) collection and (passive) accumulation. In the first case, it is the collector who selects the works, while in the latter it is the objects that have assumed the lead role. It is also common to rank unfinished collections higher than limited series (assortments). Examples of such assortments are matchboxes of a specific brand, lithographs from a particular artist, sports cars from one German manufacturer, etc. While it is easy to determine the extent and concept of the finite series, collections based on contingent dimensions such as history and taste are far more difficult to fathom. It is this unfathomable­ness that paves the way for the Collector, who with exquisite discernment and capital can act as the true artist: the bricoleur.

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

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Even the smallest collection requires administration.

As is often the case, it was the Romans who first formalized the task in the form of an office. By now Augustus had appointed a committee to administer the imperial collections and the buildings that housed them. Later, under Septimius Severus, we learn of the appointment of a procurator a pinacothecis, a high ranking official with responsibility for the state’s collection of paintings. Towards the end of the third century, the collections are governed as a fully developed ‘state within the state’, supported by procurators, collectors, art historians and advisors.

Henceforth the collections are dissolved in step with the empire, before they are scattered across the entire region. Individual works, such as the Laocoön group or the Portland vase, suddenly re­emerge after having lain in the ground undisturbed for centuries, attracting maximum interest.

In the collection, transitory work and work of uncertain provenance is returned to its rightful context. Pointing out an origin outside the collection, or showing contrasts between the collection’s current form and the work’s creation, is only of historical interest in as much as the individual object first becomes visible in relation to the collection. This point can be easily illustrated with the following recourse: at what point did the Laocoön group become part of the Vatican collections? Upon acquisition and the first public viewing in February 1506?

During the unearthing and excavation one month prior to that? Upon Pliny the Elder’s description of the sculpture in Emperor Titus’ palace in the year 72? Upon the production of the original bronze sculpture on Rhodes two centuries prior to that?

At the moment of the idea for this production?

At the idea of the idea?

Grew’s inclusion of the most common and known in the notion of the collection constitutes a transition from private cabinets of curiosities to universal collections under scientific auspices.

In the long term, this transition is the source of new disciplines, which each describes in its own way the accumulated material. In 1733, Linné made his first large collection of plants from Lapland. Afterwards, the descriptions were published consecutively in books such as Systema Naturae, Flora Lapponica and Species Plantarum. Contemporary with Linné, Winckelmann under­took a series of comparative studies in the public galleries in Rome and Florence. In 1764, his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums was published, a chronological account of the history of art in antiquity conveyed through organic terms such as growth, maturity and decline.

The accumulated meaning of the words uncovers connections which in everyday language are lost under a thick layer of provisional usage. If we take the word thing, it is derived from the Old Norse þing and the Germanic *þinga­, which means both object and assembly. Both *þinga­and the Gothic word for time, þeihs, belong to the Indo European verbal subject *ten-k-, ‘to draw together’.

In all these instances, thing is a conglomerate of assembly, object and time.

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Collections are not only historical, but also transcendental categories. Just as we cannot imagine substantive work outside of space, or temporary work outside of time, we cannot imagine an art object independent of its potential to connect with other objects through the collection. The object is detached and independent in so far as it can exist in all conceivable situations. But this form of independence arises out of the collection, and through that displays a de facto dependence. The act of imagining a work detached from any collection, or of thinking of the collection without the individual objects, is as feasible as stating the coordinates of a point beyond the scope of the coordinate system.

Each collection is temporary. With the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660, objects immediately began to be collected for scientific study. A few years later Robert Hooke was named Keeper of the Repository. As manager of the collection he sets about acquiring a group of shells and ‘natural rarities’. This acquisition marks the beginning of a race towards completion, with the quest for the complete collection resulting in titanic accumulations. Right after the acquisition, members of the society urged that collecting be intensified, and in 1669 they employed Thomas Willisel to scour the British Isles in search of objects for a ‘universal taxonomy’ of natural phenomena. The goal is nothing less than a complete re­presentation of natural history. Twelve years later, in 1681, the botanist Nehemiah Grew published a catalogue raisonné of the collection at that point in time.

In the preface, he remonstrates with those who seek to limit the collection to ‘things strange and rare’. In order for it to invoke universal worth, he writes, it must also accommodate ‘the most known and common amongst us’.

Winckelmann’s famous comments that the Laocoön group constitutes ‘a perfect rule of art’ must be read on the basis of the collection as a phenomenon. Not until collecting, juxtaposing and comparing, does it become possible to read the lines of development on history’s enormous palm.

Long before Lamarck and Darwin, Winckelmann classifies the works of art into sets of Greek originals and their Roman variations. The sets multiply as the written account gradually draws nearer to his own time, right until they break up into a throng of variants with no obvious affinity to the masterpieces of antiquity. In an effort to remedy the broken line of succession, Winckelmann prescribes his classicis­tic programme of returning to the Greeks and imitating them–not to replicate the origin, but to make ourselves unique (unnachamlich). Again, it is the collection that marks the concept of the work with its profound fingerprint.

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§ 15 The notion of the collection that we are attempting to account for here is analogous to the idea of parliament. As an institution, the Norwegian Storting does not only accommodate the National Assembly sitting at any one time. It also has at its disposal the legislation of the preceding assemblies, as well as the infrastructure and procedures for the enlistment of new representatives. Any attempt to reduce the Storting to the current assem­bly of elected representatives, or even worse, to equate the yellow brick building at the top of parliament hill with the country’s legislature, confuses politics with the political, the actual with the potential.

Naturally, the power (potentia) to pass laws is far more comprehensive than what takes place during question time or during the tabling of new motions.

§ 16 The constitutional sovereignty of the King does not show itself in the constitution’s confirmation of his irreproachability and immunity, but in the power to collect. This power nevertheless presupposes that the assembly exists in advance, and that it can simply be brought up to date in the form of a parliamentary meeting. In countries like Denmark, England and France, the head of state also possesses the right to dissolve parliament, something which in Norway has been regarded as an unwarranted expansion of authority, in as much as the king only has the power to collect that which already exists: ‘When the Storting is not assembled, it may be summoned by the King if he finds it necessary.’ (The Constitution of the Kingdom of Norway, § 69)

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

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The way in which the parts are linked indicates the struc­ture of the collection. It would not be an exaggeration to call this structure the work’s cosmos.

Even though it is possible to imagine the individual work as a detached object, it is only possible to think of this detachment in relation to the collection as cosmos and totality. For that reason, a collection can only be dissolved by having it pass into other forms. Even historically closed collections, such as the imperial collections in the Habsburg dynasty or Abbot Suger’s collections in the Basilica of Saint Denis, would of necessity preserve this openness.

We find an Old Testament expression of the open nature of the collection in the Book of Psalms, where accumulation stands in contrast to the perishability that characterises the possession of objects: ‘In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth without knowing whose it will finally be.’ (Psalms 39:6)

The promises given to museums and galleries by individual private collectors of the ‘perpetual right of disposal’ of the works holds metaphysical implications. A collection is either allocated ‘in perpetuity’ in such a way that it already embodies a piece of eternity here and now. Or else eternity is shifted to a point outside the moment so that the collection’s present form refers to what is to come.

Tackling the problem from the opposite direction by setting a right of disposal of limited duration on the works does not remove this implication, since the concept of eternity is then transferred to the collection itself. In both instances, there is talk of an understanding of time formulated as sub specie collectionis.

The difficulties of separating the imperial collections from the state’s property remain a recurrent theme throughout the history of the Roman Empire. The plundering that followed the conquests resulted in vast importations of works of art and treasures to Rome. Also, in the provinces, governors and lower statesmen acted as zealous collectors. According to Cicero, the most reckless of them, Gaius Verres, took the collection to a ‘manic and fierce level’. As the governor of Sicily, Verres seized jewellery, silver and Hellenic bronze statues whenever he came across them. In the trial against Verres, Cicero relates how his insatiable zeal (studium) for objects rapidly transformed into disease (morbus), rage (furor) and insanity (amentia). Rather than bridle the desire, Verres sought to give it free rein, something which for Cicero became a moral exemplum of corruption, a lack of moderation and fraud.

In recent times, differing degrees of autocracy or democracy have also been established through the administration of public collections. In the autumn of 1933, Göring set about planning his private Carinhall estate in Brandenburg. Concurrent with that development, his own collection of art also grew. The wealth and abundance were overwhelming, even for those who have daily dealings with the collections in the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre.

At its height, the col­lection encompassed 1,375 paintings (including the work of Cranach, Poussin, Velázquez, Titian and Tintoretto), 250 sculptures, 108 tapestries, 200 historical pieces of furniture, 60 rugs, 75 stained glass paintings and 150 other objects. Most of the works came from Dutch art dealers or from the Jeu de Paume in Paris. To make room for the art, Göring ordered the building of a large banqueting hall with pillars made of Verona marble. Here, the tables are covered with silk, the chairs upholstered in white leather, and Gobelins marked with the letter H encircled by laurels in gold embroidery. Hanging on the walls are tapestries with allegorical depictions of Youth, Health and Joy.

§ 18 The relationship between king, constitution and parliament is intricate and rests on a transcendental notion of the collective authority of the people. The elected representatives both act on behalf of the population and impose new laws, which casts deep ambiguity on their legitimacy. This ambiguity can be described as an instance of Russell’s Paradox, where the elected representatives simultaneously find themselves both inside and outside the assembly they personally represent. Eidsvoll Assemblyman, Lauritz Andreas Oftedal, even mentions this in a comment to the Eidsvoll Assembly in 1814, where he depicts the members as both participants and spectators: ‘This Assembly, which we also have the Honour to witness, has never been regarded by us as anything other than a Constitutional Committee personally chosen by the People, which upon the Invitation of the Regent should devise and draw up the Provisions by which the independent Norwegian People want to be governed and to participate in the Government. We have never been able to imagine it as a Rigsdag, under which Name we do not know either, that this Undertaking is proclaimed. Nor do we object to entrusting any of the stated Authorities other than to act in the Name of those living within the Borders personally determined by the Prince Regent.’ (Annex to Main Protocol, No.85, Eidsvoll­bakken, 13 May 1814) OSLO COLLECTED WORKS OSV.

§ 20 A psychoanalytic interpreter could not help but see the idea of the completion of the collection as the fetishisation of the unattainable object of desire. Here the missing object becomes both the reason for the collection and its possible terminus.

Should one acquire the object, collecting would cease immediately. The same applies in instances where in the end reality gets the upper hand.

Typically, La Bruyère has portrayed the unfortunate collector Democedes among his many characters.

As a collector he has devoted his life to graphic print, and even though the holdings have over time managed to fill several halls, Democedes despairs over the absence of a single part: ‘I labour under a very serious affliction which will one day or other cause me to give up collecting engravings; I have all Callot’s etchings, except one, which, to tell the truth, so far from being the best, is the worst he ever did, but which would complete my collection; I have hunted after this print these twenty years, and now I despair of ever getting it; it is very trying!’ (La Bruyère, The Characters, XIII. Of Fashion).

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§ 22 ‘I said just now, O judges, that there were many censers, in almost every house in fact; I assert also, that now there is not even one left. What is the meaning of this? What monster (monstrum), what prodigy (prodigium) did we send into the province? Does it not appear to you that he desired, when he returned to Rome, to satisfy not the covetousness of one man, not his own eyes only, but the insane passion of every covetous man (omnium cupidissimorum insanias), for as soon as he ever came into any city, immediately the Cibyratic hounds of his were slipped, to search and find everything. If they found any large vessel, any considerable work, they brought it to him with joy; if they could hunt out any smaller vessel of the same sort, they looked on those as a sort of lesser game, whether they were dishes, cups, censers, or anything else.’ (Cicero, Against Verres.

Second pleading, Book 4, ch. XXI)

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§ 24 Archaeologically speaking, the landfill is of equal importance as temple collections and royal tombs.

The discovery of antique papyrus fragments at a landfill in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in 1896 encompasses more than 500,000 bits, including some of the oldest preserved gospel texts. The fact that these fragments are not stored with regard to preservation, but rather are compiled from the extensive mémoire involontaire of a collective author, makes it natural to question the conservation regimes of today as well. Here, recycling centres like Smestad, Grefsen and Grønmo stand out as seasonal versions of Oslo’s salon des refusés. At the other end of the scale, we find the public collection pampering to the collective memory through selection and preservation. At both ends there is a steady flow of people who want to deposit their collections in public depositories.

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

Oslo Collected Works OSV. booklets

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Luhmann’s notion of self producing (autopoietic) systems can easily be applied to that of the collection. The significance of what the Germanic hordes deposited in the ground three to four thousand years ago can be discovered today in public galleries and archives. ‘Princely’ graves like those in Bornhöck, Helmsdorf and Leubingen are not merely the sites of historical events of past significance. On the contrary, the graves point the way forward to the systems of collection and accumulation of today. As Pearce notes, there is ‘a clear and unmistakable line of descent which runs from the hoards and graves of the Bronze Age, through the shrines and temples of the Iron Age and classical world, and the royal halls and churches of the medieval world, to the royal collections of early modern times, and so to the museums of the past three centuries.’

The relic has its roots in the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, where the wine and the bread are transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.

In the pursuit of highly treasured memorabilia, it is also common for the collector to cannibalise the person being collected. Through the sweatband of John McEnroe or the compact of Eva Braun, the collector does not merely seek to honour the deceased, but to possess a bit of their life. As in every collection, here there is talk of a pars pro toto mentality, where the part represents the whole.

Nonetheless, with surplus production in the trade in relics, determining which totality it refers to is not straightforward, and in an indictment from 1543, Calvin writes that accumulating has reached a level such that each of the apostles has three or four heads, six or eight legs. The multiplication of the individual apostle is nevertheless little compared to the monstrous collection of human remains, which the church oversees, and which in total far exceeds the sanctuaries they are meant to incarnate: ‘What would it be if we were to pile up the whole multitude contained in three or four thousand dioceses, in twenty or thirty thousand abbacies, forty thousand monasteries, nay more, in the whole multitude of parishes and chapels?’

(Jean Calvin, An Inventory of Relics).

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The ensemble of objects, together with their description, form the collection’s totality. Destroyed works also belong to the notion of the collection.

The same applies to the description, and to the destroyed description. To reduce a collection to its current holdings is to make an inventory. While it was previously held that the documentation of transitorily realised works was what ensured their belonging in the collection, it is natural to make an about-­turn: it is not the documentation which is due to the collection, but the collection which forms the basis of the idea of registration, portrayal and description. In individual collections there is also a concurrence between objects and documentation, such that the collection becomes a material register of itself.

The monastic collections of the Middle Ages are a cross between the Germanic princely graves and the Greek temple treasures around the Mediterranean. A new element can be glimpsed in the advancement of relics, where the mortal remains of holy women and men are sold for vast sums. The trade in relics gradually grows into a specialised market, where increasing demand is served by a steadily growing supply. The supply of remains seems unlimited and forms the basis of a heavily taxed necronomy. The collection of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg is significant in this respect; over the course of his life he made five pilgrimages to Rome on the hunt for relics. In time he was granted the right to mint his own coins, and in the year 958 using self issued currency he paid for a gold reliquary with the remains of Saint Maurice. After Bishop Ulrich’s death and canonisation in 993 his own remains were enshrined, and a chapel raised over the reliquary.

Later, Emperor Otto III’s entrails were also buried next to Ulrich’s grave.

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§ 29 The museum is to the collection, what the mausoleum is to the dead body: here time is frozen, but not in immortality. Instead death is drawn out like mummified infinity.

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Sources The Bible, New International Version: Hodder & Stotton, 2011.

La Bruyère, The Characters, translated by Henri Van Laun, New York: Scribner & Welford, 1885 [1688].

Jean Calvin, An Inventory of Relics, translated by Henry Beveridge, Edinburgh: The Calvin Translation Society, 1844 [1543].

Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Vol. I, translated by C.D.Yonge, London: Henry G. Boon, 1866 [70 BC].

Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, or, A catalogue & description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham College, London: W. Rawlins, 1681.

The Constitution of the Kingdom of Norway, as laid down on May 17, 1814 by the Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll, subsequently amended, most recently by Resolution of June 1, 2018.

Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, London/New York: Routledge, 1995.

Riksforsamlingens forhandlinger. Første del. Protoller med bilag og tillæg, Kristiania: Grøndahl & Søns Boktrykkeri, 1914 [1814].

Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment, London: J.M. Dent, 1980.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerey und Bildhauerkunst, Dresden: In der Waltherischen Hof-Buchhandlung, 1756.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Dresden: In der Waltherischen Hof-Buchhandlung, 1764.

JAN FREUCHEN / JONAS HØGLI MAJOR / SIGURD TENNINGEN

For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, Hlynur Hallsson presents a series of site-specific text pieces with the generic title Seven Works for Seven Locations.

Each work consists of three different texts in three different languages, spray-canned onto existing structures in the cityscape.

They may be of varying duration; while the text in the Vigeland park has already been erased, the other pieces may continue indefinitely.

ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

HLYNUR HALLSSON SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

TEXT BASED WORK LOCATION

THE VIGELAND SCULPTURE PARK IN FROGNER PARK HUK, BYGDØY ETTERSTADGATA 6, VÅLERENGA SØRENGA BRIDGE, BJØRVIKA AN ELECTRICITY MAST AT BJERKE STOVNER METRO STATION GRORUD METRO STATION STATUS

ONGOING

HLYNUR HALLSSON (1968, Iceland) lives and works in Iceland and Germany. Language and communication play an essential roles in his practice as an artist and curator, and in his work, which moves across mediums, from installation to photography. Through conceptual and purposeful multilingualism, Hallsson explores the semantic difficulties of communication surrounding a work of art and the cultural preconditions of, and multifarious opportunities for, interpretation. He has exhibited and completed curatorial work at Kunstraum München, Reykjavík Art Museum, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Chinati Foundation, Locker Plant, Marfa, Texas, Overgaden, Copenhagen and is represented by Kuckei + Kuckei gallery, Berlin.

Do you pronounce it ‘Oslo’ or ‘Oshlo’? Is the metro to Sognsvann a T-bane or a trikk? At one time, Oslo dialects marked a dividing line between east and west, with clear differences in accent and pronunciation on either side of Akerselva. Today, Oslo is a modern, multilingual city with a wealth of languages and ways of talking. Hlynur Hallsson’s project for osloBIENNALEN reminds us of this.

His works are a series of murals each consisting of text, three different statements on the same theme. Although the theme recurs in each mural, the statements are drawn from different contexts and have slightly different nuances. So the same work speaks of a theme in three different ways, and in three different languages. Hallsson alternates between Polish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Northern Sámi, English, Swedish, Somali and Icelandic. Apart from Icelandic – his own language – these are languages that are commonly spoken in Oslo today.

But few of us speak more than one of them. So some messages will remain incomprehensible to most of us. Perhaps this reflects the experience of living in modern Oslo?

Seven artists, curators, theorists and writers have been invited to write a short essay based on each of Hlynur Hallson’s text works for osloBIENNALEN.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS. IMMIGRANTS IN OSLO, SØRENGA BRIDGE

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Markús Þór Andrésson ON THE WORK OF HLYNUR HALLSSON Markús Þór Andrésson is a curator based in Reykjavík, and Chief Curator at the Reykjavík Art Museum. He writes about Hlynur Hallsson’s text based work.

SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS

Language is the wall between us. It bricks us up on one side, leaving the rest of the world on the other. The arbitrary relationship between what we think and feel and the words we choose to express it, leaves us roaming around a semantic labyrinth. It is substantial enough to enclose seven and a half billion individuals whose paths never seem to cross. We can only just hear each other murmuring on the other side of these endless walls. Outside the maze are all the non-human animals chirping, squeaking, barking, growling and roaring in incoherent, phonemic union. Inside, someone is giving these walls a taste of their own medicine, with words serving exclusively as raw material for his practice. Working expeditiously, he leaves words and sentences behind in different bright colours and separate languages, conflating perception and meaning. Should anyone stumble across these writings, they are left with an invitation to do two things, understand and/or penetrate. One will bring you possible meaning, leaving you–after a moment of contemplation–to continue your aimless roam along the walls. The other, however, may allow you to see language as architecture, syntax as sculpture and words as clay. The relationship between language and spatial cognition unravels and, brick by brick, you may deconstruct a hole in the wall big enough for you to comprehend the Om – giving rise to every word used in all languages. From the rubble you can build novel spatial representations; tunnels, stairs, bridges or whatever may facilitate harmony beyond the walls.

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Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir IMMIGRANTS IN OSLO Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir is an Associate Professor in Art History and Art Theory at the University of Iceland and freelance curator. She writes about the work Immigrants in Oslo on Sørenga Bridge.

Political slogans, advertising and public communication visualize power games, conflicts and social tensions in the urban space. Since 2002, Hlynur Hallsson has been using texts as rhetorical mechanisms to comment on political realities and other matters of concern in local and international contexts. His interventions interact with news and other public communications and even though they are ephemeral, like graffiti on a wall, he constantly maintains the rule that the phrases are written as a linguistic sequence in which each language is marked with a specific color that recalls the symbolism of national flags. In his early works, the sequence was Icelandic, German, and English.

Icelandic is his native mother tongue; historically, German was the language of European culture; and English is the language of world politics, global consumption and communication. In his new works produced for the Oslo biennale, Hallsson extends the written texts to Norwegian, English, Icelandic, Swedish, Sami, Lithuanian, Polish and Somali, as all these languages represent the multicultural population of Norway and its global concerns.

The text-work Immigrants in Oslo reflects directly up on how distorted statistics are used to produce fake assumptions about immigrants. The text written in Swedish, Somali and Lithuanian, reveals the strength of language and the fragility of truth in contemporary contexts where disinformation is increasingly used in media by populist forces to undermine democratic discourse. Here Hallsson extends his textual interventions away from direct critical comments as in earlier works such as TAKK FYRIR ALLT ÁLIÐ – VIELEN DANK FUR DANS GANZE ALUMINIUM – THANKS FOR ALL THE ALUMINIUM, towards a more discursive analysis of the fragility of the public sphere in contemporary democracy. Through his bold interventions, Hallsson therefore raises important questions about the power of the written word and the frail status of truth in our global contemporaneity when the difference between public information, disinformation and advertising has become blurred in the public mind.

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Alexander Steig ROCHADE Alexander Steig is an artist and curator.

He writes about the work The King of Norway at Grorud metro station.

Iceland has not had a king since its independence from Denmark in 1944. Do the Icelandic people miss their monarch? There are 47 sovereign states in Europe, with two queens and six kings (as well as several noble families without political influence). We are not dealing with despots, but the constitutional representatives of their countries.

Nevertheless, the constitutional monarchy, which does not assess the competence of the persons it employs, seems old-fashioned as a form of state.

Most of the royal houses have a major presence in the tabloids. From the point of view of parliamentary democracy, these representations remind one of anti-modern theatre and the rituals of folklore.

Whether they are innocent or deliberate remains an open question.

The Icelandic conceptual artist Hlynur Hallsson has placed a hidden monument to the Norwegian kings in the east of Oslo, spray-canning trilingual fragments of inconsequential anecdotes and key events in Norwegian history in a metro-station (Grorud stasjon) in English (as lingua franca), Norwegian (the local language) and Polish (contextual). The succinct sentences provide information about Olav V’s international education. That the DanishNorwegian king lost Denmark-Norway to Sweden.

Or how, as the scion of a dynasty, Harald V met elected foreign representatives. One learns that the regents of the old Europe networked internationally and that they were in some ways not only rulers of their countries, but were also (and still are?) the ‘first Europeans.’

SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS

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Hlynur Hallsson draws these fragments of text from the media environment – newspapers and other sources – which he searches for on the Internet. In doing so, he combines them thematically in terms of language and colour in such a way that the piece could be formally reminiscent of a poem beyond understanding. Since 2002, the artist has realized more than 20 of these text projects in Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Japan, Croatia, Sweden and the USA. The hyper-authenticity of the capitals, their colour classification, and their location-related arrangement, paired with the way their respective semantic features and absurdities are treated, can also be read as a contribution to political/concrete poetry. Here in Oslo, the artist has represented well-known figures and events as a laconic commentary addressing both Norwegians and visitors to their capital. He reflects on the relaxed attitude in which people regard contemporary monarchies, whose members make considerable efforts to appear just like everyone else, as well as a certain tragedy and involuntary comedy that constantly gains fresh nourishment from their over-presence in the media. The piece draws attention to this widespread attention, while the pomp and glory of monarchy are rendered redundant when presented as graffiti. The three slogans are not a revolutionary appeal against feudal structures. They seem interchangeable with the host of similar headlines about the throne and the crown. Their variety suggests a potential rochade, a manoeuvre by the artist, a modus operandi that fosters uncomplicated multilayered interpretations of politics and society.

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The King of Norway, Grorud Metro Station

HLYNUR HALLSSON

Einar Bjarki Malmquist PRECISELY OSLO Einar Bjarki Malmquist is an architect, at Ola Roald Arkitektur in Oslo, and former editor of Arkitektur N, The Norwegian Review of Architecture. He writes about the work Minority Groups in Oslo at The Vigeland Sculpture Park in Frogner Park.

As a former land surveyor, artist Hallsson knows that every measurement one takes suffers an element of inbuilt imprecision, a possible error. As a land surveyors lays out a road in the landscape or places a house, his measuring peg–sprayed blue, green, yellow or red–is always slightly to the left or the right of the peg placed by the previous surveyor. Sometimes the pegs are a few centimetres apart, sometimes almost on the same spot. But only almost. So is it with Hlynur Hallsson’s work.

Three sentences found on the Internet are now on a wall in Oslo. The themed sentences, like another piece about “minority groups in Oslo,” are written in three different languages, spraycanned in three different colours. Like the pegs of the land surveyor, precision and imprecision intertwine. There is bound to be at least some small difference in x, y or z.

Jill Maurah Leciejewski THIS IS OSLO Jill Maurah Leciejewski is an art historian based in Berlin. She writes about the work This is Oslo located on an electricity mast at Bjerke.

This is Oslo. The title of the work reveals the thematic context linking the individual sentences, even though the viewer may not speak all three languages. Hallsson locates the texts using Internet search engines. This endows the selection with an element of chance, but at the same time selection is subject to the omnipresence of search engine optimisation. The aim is to create contrasts between language, content and form, which can reach a level tantamount to provocation.

The contents themselves act as fragments of information that set out to provoke curiosity and raise questions. Hallsson is less concerned with the actual informational value of the lines of text, which in any case are removed from their original context, but rather with a mental point of departure for the recipient. This is Oslo.

A meeting of ideas and the space of democracy The agora of ancient Athens was a marketplace, of ideas as much as goods. According to Hannah Arendt, who often mentions that Socrates’ objective was to get the citizens to make friends, the aim of the polis–the city–is to bring people together and provide spaces for planned as well as unplanned human communication. Closer to modern times, the history of the Eidsvoll House and its assembly room, a room that became the setting for the bicentenary of the Norwegian constitution, tells us how an arbitrary place takes on historic importance. Democracy needs spaces, public spaces, both large ones and arbitrary small ones, in order to unfold. In Oslo, Hlynur draws attention to a plurality of spaces pregnant for human communication. Reminding us that democracy and its thought exchange must be performed rather than delegated to a bureaucracy. Are we the new surveyors of Oslo?

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In the work This is Oslo, Hlynur Hallsson resorts to one of his tried and tested artistic formats.

Three passages of text in different languages are brought together as a continuous volume of text in contrasting colours under a connecting title. In this piece he uses Icelandic, synonymous with his origin; English, as a world language understood by billions of people; and Polish, as a symbol of discovery, learning processes and understanding.

Spray-painted onto surfaces, Hallsson’s technique holds these otherwise volatile elements in union.

He has consciously dispensed with large canvases or monumental panels in favour of the simplest means of production. In doing so, he deliberately runs a risk of being misunderstood. Especially when it comes to installations in urban areas, where his work is not always understood by the general public as art. Apperception demands an attentive eye and an alert mind. This is Oslo.

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SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS. THE MAYOR OF OSLO, STOVNER METRO STATION / THE SÁMI PEOPLE IN OSLO, ETTERSTADGATA 6

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Kristin Kjartansdóttir THE MAYOR OF OSLO Kristin Kjartansdóttir is a social historian, freelance writer and manager of the cultural spot Flora in North Iceland. She writes about the work The Mayor of Oslo.

Our contemporary everyday, governed by the overdimensional flow of information and impressions transmitted through diverse media, is a new experience for mankind. What is new is not the information itself, but its accessibility. It is the ease of access that makes it overflow. Everything flows in our direction and we can immerse ourselves in it in a second. All the info.

The sea of information we live in.

Kari Ósk Ege THE FENG SHUI PROBLEM Kari Ósk Grétudóttir Ege is an Icelandic/ Norwegian visual artist and writer, based in Oslo. She writes about the work The Vigeland Park at Huk, Bygdøy.

Due to its newness, we do not have grandparents, or even parents to pass on the know-how, the knowledge, of how to deal with this flow, how to live in this kind of world. We must ask ourselves: what tools should we use? By what means can we stay afloat?

Vigeland Park smells of flowers, dog poo, grilled food, alcohol, perfume, coffee, mouldy or newmown grass, metal, juice warm and frozen, and the scent of a kindergarten teacher – the vague but exciting odour of bleach. The sensory experience of the past invades the present, irrespective of the season. And somewhere there is the sum of all the times you have ever visited the park.

As a wanderer on today’s sea of information, it is necessary to find the right tools and methods.

With their assistance one may ascend to a point that overlooks the morass of information. Instead of losing our way in the fog generated by the contemporary overdose of impressions and information, we must search for ways to deal with the situation, sort it out, choose what we need, take point, and rise above it.

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Although it isn’t as easy to get lost in Vigeland Park as it is in the Tiergarten, I am nevertheless unable to get clear a mind’s-eye view of the park. I have recurring dreams about the park. It grows and spreads everywhere, like the Manchurian mushroom that lifestyle gurus use to brew their kombucha, which can grow as large as an inland lake.

But in reality nothing called Vigeland Park exists.

The park in question consists of two parts. On one side there is the Vigeland complex – that is, the sculpture complex – and on the other side Frogner Park. Vigeland Park is therefore a misunderstanding.

Nevertheless – or perhaps for that very reason – Hlynur Hallsson chooses to call his work The Vigeland Park. The work consists of three different texts about the park that the artist has found on the Internet.

The Internet has long since become the ultimate lost property depot. Physical searching is today reserved for archaeologists and for people who are unable to put things where they belong, either physically or mentally. The past is not so easy to place, and the nose is the eternally open portal to memory.

Hlynur Hallsson has chosen a series of seemingly random texts from the sea of information that floods our world. Sprayed-canned onto previously unused public spaces, they have been given a new meaning and at the same time have given these spaces a new use, defined them anew. The texts drawn from the sea of information flowing across the media world now stand for themselves. They seem to range over the vast sea of information, the great flow reminiscent of The wanderer above the sea of fog by 19th century German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.

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In the work Berlin Childhood around 1900, Walter Benjamin wrote that to a child the city is a labyrinth. To get as close as possible to ‘the truth’ about childhood in the city, Benjamin tried to relive the city from the child’s perspective. An important part of growing up in Berlin was getting lost in the Tiergarten.

Fortunately, the Vigeland sculptures, riven as they are by forces and feelings, can play out any psychodrama from the archives of memory. In the meantime, we can safely paddle in the fountain and eat a bursting sausage.

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SEVEN WORKS FOR SEVEN LOCATIONS. MINORITY GROUPS IN OSLO, THE VIGELAND PARK, OSLO / THIS IS OSLO, BJERKE, OSLO

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Another Grammar for Oslo consists of a series of workshops at several libraries located around Oslo, in which artists Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira collect and translate stories recounted by members of the diverse communities who live and work in the city. Life stories and memories are registered as texts and motifs, and stencilled onto fabric and paper. The project aims to transmit stories that are invisible in the official narratives of Oslo and its neighbourhoods, but which nevertheless help define them.

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MÔNICA NADOR BRUNO OLIVEIRA ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO

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MÔNICA NADOR (1955, Brazil) is a visual artist whose earliest work dates from the 1980s. In 2004, Nador founded Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), a community centre that promotes lectures, workshops, activities and exhibitions among local residents to encourage the development of both cultural and political awareness in São Paulo’s Jardim Miriam district, where Nador lives and works.

BRUNO OLIVEIRA is a visual artist and an educator.

Along with Mônica Nador and Thais Scabio, he is a coordinator for Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC) and is currently a PhD Student in Visual Arts with a research background in geopolitics, aesthetic speculation and decolonial visuality in Latin America and the coordinator of the cultural centre Casa 1 (São Paulo/Brazil), which offers shelter to LGBT people expelled from their homes.

Who decides which narratives will be preserved for posterity? Your local library is full of books and stories, but perhaps very few of them are about a life that resembles your own. In their one-year project for osloBIENNALEN, Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira are collecting stories like yours. They call the project Another grammar for Oslo. This does not refer to grammar in the sense of verb conjugations or rules about the use of commas, but to language itself. In a series of workshops at several branches of Deichmann public library, Holmlia, Bjerke and Grünerløkka, Nador and Oliveira will give Oslo-dwellers the opportunity to pass on their narratives, each in their own way, through paper and textile prints.

The artists will create books and patchwork quilts with texts and motifs from these. Finally, all the narratives will be brought together in a large installation outside the headquarters of osloBIENNALEN at Myntgata 2 as a distinctive, colourful new library of Oslo stories – perhaps with your story included? What language will you use to tell your story?

MÔNICA NADOR / BRUNO OLIVEIRA

ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO. WORKSHOP AT DEICHMAN LIBRARIES, SUMMER 2019

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Deise Faria Nunes THE POWER OF LISTENING: DIAPRAXIS, PLAY AND ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR THE CITY Deise Faria Nunes (BR/NO) is an artistic concept developer, researcher, writer and dramaturg, and currently a PhD researcher in theatre at the University of Agder, Norway. Among other things, she has acted as founder, producer and project leader for ACTS Laboratory for Performative Practice in Oslo, and as a project developer and dramaturg for Nordic Black Theatre. In this essay she writes about Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira’s work on community building in relation to the concepts of diapraxis, performance and play.

Deeply rooted at the heart of Jardim Miriam, on the southern outskirts of São Paulo, the Brazilian visual artists Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira (also known as Bruno O.) are preparing for the inception of Another Grammar for Oslo; this community-based art project is a commission by the first edition of the Oslo Biennale.

The idea of building other grammars and ways of understanding, reading and narrating the city and its histories will be realised through stencil printmaking and patterning workshops, and the creation of a series of short texts, poems and songs by women of different origins, all contributing to the formation of a collective network of meanings.

In this short essay, I would like to focus on the duo’s work and community building activity, in the light of the concepts diapraxis, performance and play.

Jardim Miriam, São Paulo – Oslo, Norway Writing about Mônica Nador and Bruno O. is not possible without considering their backgrounds.

Nador was born into an upper-middle class family in the city of Ribeirão Preto. Her interest in art was already present in her youth awakened by her father, a medical doctor and amateur painter.

After graduating in art, Nador set about producing works for gallery-curated sales exhibitions. An established and well-selling artist, she found herself losing faith in and enthusiasm for the art scene. She then pursued further studies leading to an MFA. During the conversation we had before writing this essay, Nador told me that her research at that point led her to a deeper understanding of the class structure in Brazil.

She acknowledged the fact that at that time the art world was in no way democratically accessible to the less privileged.

Nador decided to move to Jardim Miriam in 2004, where she set up a community-based project. The residents of this district known as the ABCD – one of the largest industrial areas in the country – formed strong movements against labour exploitation, to improve workers’ rights and social equality.

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In that same year, she established the organisation JAMAC – Jardim Miriam Art Club. The space offers stencil, silkscreen and audio-visual workshops and fosters cultural activities at the intersection between art and practices for democratic citizenship.

JAMAC’s main objective is to build training processes that stimulate encounters between art and life, aesthetics and politics. The space hosts activities such as workshops, exhibitions, round table discussions and open-access classes, always focusing on diversity, inclusion and the right to access city spaces and memory.

Bruno O., an educator and visual artist, first met Nador through a project at Jardim Miriam. He is a PhD research fellow in Visual Arts at UFMG, Federal University of Minas Gerais, working on the project Performing the Institution: Power grammars, insurgent aesthetics and devices of counter-hegemony in Latin American art. A community worker, he is the coordinator at Casa 1, a welcoming space for LGBT youth expelled from their homes due to non-acceptance of their sexuality. Bruno O. also works at JAMAC under Nador’s leadership.

— Oslo is a divided city. The calm waters of the Akers River tell the history of the city’s industrialisation and urbanisation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Two apparently antagonistic urban spaces emerged from this process: the wealthy and mostly white Westside and the more socio-economically challenged Eastern and Southern districts, where people of colour, migrants and a multicultural population is concentrated. According to the Brazilian philosopher Sueli Carneiro, skin color structures class in Brazil. This reality, very much present in Jardim Miriam, may also affect the prosperous Norwegian capital to a greater extent than the white majority likes to admit.

In their project description, the artists expound their idea of shared art practices aimed at increasing awareness of the exercise of citizenship among communities.

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The work will be implemented over a two-year timeframe, supported by the city’s Deichman public libraries and produced by the Biennale.

The community-based performing arts project Nordic Black Theatre, situated in the multicultural central-eastern area of Oslo, is also involved.

Using facilities provided by the libraries, Nador and Oliveira will offer workshops in drawing and stencil printing techniques to different local communities. The Deichman libraries are spaces that naturally support intercultural and intergenerational exchanges and are therefore a fundamental element of the project: This project [aims] at the recovery of the narratives from their territories of origin and their affective memories. It is understood that such stories are present [in] the structure of the territory, although invisible in the official narratives. Above all, it is intended to stimulate the exercise of the fundamental role of art being socially useful, engaging everyone involved in the work (…).

Nador and Oliveira will, through their idea of new narratives for the city, build on their experiences of art as a means of social change, from the particular reality of Jardim Miriam, applying them to the increasingly more othered Eastern Oslo by means of diapraxis and performance, as outlined below.

Dialogue, diapraxis and performance The concept of diapraxis was coined by the Danish researcher Lissi Rasmussen in her dissertation Diapraksis og dialog mellem kristne og muslimer (Diapraxis and dialogue between Christian and Muslims, 1997), which was later published as a book.

For Lissi Rasmussen, dialogue in the sense of twoway communication, is defined as happening in a spirit of mutual trust and respect. Through her fieldwork experience on the African continent, she discovered that dialogue is meaningful only when rooted in co-existence and common practice. This discovery led her to coin the concept diapraxis, that is, dialogue as action. For Rasmussen, dialogue can only exist through diapraxis. Based on a common notion of life through interpersonal identification and compassion, found both in Christian liberation theology and in the Quran, she defines diapraxis as sharing activities and experiences with others.

MÔNICA NADOR / BRUNO OLIVEIRA

This understanding of collective participation is also a fundamental component of performance.

Set time: an arbitrary timeframe is imposed on the event.

Since the mid-1960s, American theatre director and scholar Richard Schechner has been concerned with one major question: what features do theatre events belonging to diverse genres share with religious and secular rituals, sports, play, political demonstrations and artistic events? Can the nature of such events be understood by using a common set of tools and methods? Schechner’s inquiries led to a productive collaboration with the American anthropologist Victor Turner. The resulting reflections were later organized under the name Performance Theory. For Schechner, there are certain recognizable patterns common to activities such as ritual, theatre, dance, music, sports, play, social drama and various popular entertainments.

Participatory art projects connected to building or strengthening communities, such as the JAMAC project and Another Grammar for Oslo, can also be understood in terms of performance theory.

Symbolic time: performance time is a representation of another timeframe.

For Turner: A performance is a dialectic of ‘flow’, that is, spontaneous movement in which action and awareness are one, and ‘reflexivity’, in which the central meanings, values and goals of a culture are seen ‘in action’, as they shape and explain behaviour. A performance is declarative of our shared humanity, yet it utters the uniqueness of particular cultures.

This definition comprises two aspects that are experienced at the same time: ‘flow’ –the aesthetical, dramaturgical aspect, the immaterial component of the art (making) experience – and ‘reflexivity’– the socio-cultural aspect, the one that fosters the ties that keep the community together.

Some characteristics of performance are essential to an understanding of such phenomena. Here I can mention a few, for instance: Time: Performance time is different from daily life time in certain specific ways: Event time: the sequence of actions belonging to the event shall be fully performed independently of daily life time. This feature has of course boundaries connected to the general timeframe defined by the community or facilitators of the event.

ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO

Objects: in performance, objects may have a different value than in daily life. Their meaning may vary according to symbols and traditions and their manipulation may have great significance for the whole development of the performance event.

Non-productivity: performance activities generate no monetary wealth and do not contribute to economic productivity from a capitalist perspective.

Another relevant aspect of performance theory is the restoration of behaviour or twice-behaved behaviour. As Schechner affirms: “Performance means: never for the first time.” This does not deny the possibilities of experiencing something new every time a particular performance event takes place, perhaps in a new room, perhaps with different participants, most certainly with something unexpected taking place. Twice behaved behaviour refers to the idea of performance as an inherent part of human nature, something anterior to culture and therefore always with us.

This aspect rests on the fact that behaviour exists separately from the person who behaves. This condition makes it possible to store, transmit, manipulate or transform behaviour. As in the games children play, for instance.

The performance concept of play can be a useful tool for approaching interactions in the social practice arts field.

In addition to ludic activities common to childhood, play can have a variety of meanings and uses: in the English language, the term is applied both to define acting, playing musical instruments and games, or practicing sports. It is a difficult concept to pin down or imprison in a fixed frame of definitions or characteristics.

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Play can be considered as a social meeting place in which the rules are set by the players or insiders according to a given tradition. Social conventions such as status, gender and cultural identities are reaffirmed, challenged, tested, changed or reorganized. It is not likely to have a goal in itself; doing the activity is the goal. It may or may not lead to concrete results. In the case of Another Grammar for Oslo, there is an established idea of creating outputs in the form of artworks, although, according to Nador, it is always the participants’ engagement that sets the agenda.

In this way, diapraxis, performance and play can be considered analogous activities.

The power of listening to create new vocabularies, syntaxes and meanings

References Nador, Mônica & Bruno O. Another Grammar for Oslo.

Project description for osloBIENNALEN, 2019.

Mônica Nador’s Wikipedia page: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B4nica_Nador Municipality of São Paulo, demographic data: https://bit.ly/2I1YDiR Skype Conversation with Mônica Nador and Bruno Oliveira on March 12th, 2019.

Rasmussen, Lissi. Diapraksis og dialog mellem kristne og muslimer. (Århus: Aarhus universitetsforlag, 1997).

Schechner, Richard & Willa Appel. By Means of Performance: Intercultural studies of theatre and ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Carneiro, Sueli. Interview with Bianca Santana in Cult Magazine. May 9th 2017. Retrieved on March 21st 2019.

There have been discussions about the potentially interventionist character of community-based, institutionally-run art projects. Sometimes, the ways in which the art scene approaches challenged communities is infused with often subconscious – but nonetheless deeply damaging – patronizing notions of knowledge and cultural values. An outsider usually needs a long time to process all the information and establish the necessary relations.

In order to establish a conversation through a certain practice, as in the idea of diapraxis, or to create meaningful, community-based performance spaces, it is of major importance to develop the ability to listen. To the forces that pulse in the shared life of the locals. To the community’s own time, rhythm, relations, virtues and problems.

Another Grammar for Oslo is conceived as a listening project. Connecting community spaces, democratic access to the city, artistic craft and a series of flexibly structured events, participants in the project will be empowered to inscribe their own vocabularies, syntaxes and meanings in the city’s cultural and artistic landscape. Through their extensive and deeply committed experiences with the residents of Jardim Miriam, Mônica Nador and Bruno O. are setting out to act as amplifiers of long-silenced Oslo voices.

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ANOTHER GRAMMAR FOR OSLO. TEXTILE DETAIL

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National Episodes: Grini and the Futures of Norway is the first of a series of short theatrical pieces inspired by pivotal moments in the history of Norway, created by the collective artist persona Rose Hammer. The first episode is based on the historical meetings that took place at Grini prison camp during World War II.

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ROSE HAMMER NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

ROSE HAMMER is an artist persona comprised of a collective group of individuals. Evolving and changing, Rose Hammer is, in no particular order: Kim Svensson, Emilie Birkeland, Élise Guerrier, Alma Braun, Mattias Hellberg, Niels Munk Plum, Jakob Tamm, Arely Amaut Gomez Sanchez, Evelin Sillén, Emil Andersson, Alessandro Marchi, Stacey de Voe, Nora Joung, Victoria Durnak, Morten Langeland, Sara Hermansson, Sahar Seyedian, Qi Tan, Ole-Petter Arneberg, Per-Oskar Leu and Dora García, and also includes the generous and gifted collaboration of graphic designer Alex Gifreu and theatre expert Samir Kandil. Although not exclusively, the name “Rose Hammer” may refer to a) the hammer inscribed on Henrik Ibsen’s grave monument in Oslo; b) the former emblem of the Norwegian labour movement; c) the famous quote attributed to Bertolt Brecht: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”; d) the rose symbol which became popular among socialist and social democratic political parties in post-World War II Western Europe.

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TWO EVENING PERFORMANCES ON MAY 26th 2019 What is at stake when history is written? The most defining moments in a nation’s history often unfold in a few minutes, are decided by a handful of people, behind closed doors, removed from public institutions or momentous historic speeches in public arenas. Rose Hammer is a collective artistic persona who has set out to draw attention to this phenomenon, specifically those key moments that have shaped the Norway of today and its possible futures. For osloBIENNALEN Rose Hammer will produce a series of performances – entitled National Episodes – in the Brechtian Lehrstücke (lesson play) tradition. These will revisit low-key but transcendent episodes in Norwegian history, such as the mythical meetings that took place at Grini prison camp Barrack 12 during the Nazi occupation of Norway. It is a historical fact that networks of political prisoners during the WWII shaped what Norway has become today. Hence the title of this first National Episode: Grini and the Futures of Norway. After the Grini narrative, Rose Hammer will move on to other episodes, both mythical and historic.

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NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY. ROSE HAMMER STUDIO IN MYNTGATA 2

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Sven Lütticken THE NAME OF THE ROSE — FRAGMENTS FROM A CONVERSATION WITH ROSE HAMMER Sven Lütticken is an art critic, curator and historian who contributes regularly to art magazines such as New Left Review, Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, Grey Room and Afterall.

In this conversation he talks to two of the individuals who make up the artist persona Rose Hammer.

NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

Rose Hammer is an artistic persona made up of a variable group of individuals. ROSE HAMMER 1 (RH 1) and ROSE HAMMER 2 (RH 2) are members of this group.

ROSE HAMMER 1 Creating a collective author under the name Rose Hammer is something we came up with as a way of countering the inertia of individual artistic authorship, CV, photo, style, expectations…

ROSE HAMMER 2 The name Rose Hammer partly stems from the curious change in iconography among European socialist and social democratic parties in the years following 1968. From what we can tell, the Parti Socialiste in France was the first left wing group to adopt the rose as a symbol with its well-known fist and rose emblem designed in 1969. Soon after, the rose was more or less universally adopted as the visual identity of socialism, at the expense of more ‘militant’ imagery of labour struggles such as hammers, torches, trios of arrows etc. The rose and the hammer encapsulate both the triumph and the subsequent failure of the socialist project in Europe.

Besides, Rose Hammer is a versatile and somewhat international name, as the words are the same in English, German and several Scandinavian languages.

Rose Hammer is an exercise in working together, using tools borrowed from the workers’ theatre movement of the 1920s and ’30s such as the speech choir. There will surely be conflicts along the way, and our attempts may fail miserably (as tends to be the case with this type of idealistic undertaking). But if our predecessors were able to speak in unison and rally around a common cause, why shouldn’t we succeed in doing the same? While some of us have played a bigger role during the initial stages of this project, it is our hope that Rose Hammer will grow into a horizontal unit where everyone’s voice carries the same weight. As such, Rose Hammer is also an experiment in relinquishing individual ownership.

By joining Rose Hammer, every member will receive an equal part of the credit (or blame) for the works of art produced by the collective.

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RH 1 Rose Hammer is the author of the work: a collective persona made up of a variable group of individuals. The name “Rose Hammer” may, though not exclusively, refer to: a) the hammer inscribed on Henrik Ibsen’s gravestone in Oslo; b) the former emblem of the Norwegian labour movement; c) the famous quote attributed to Brecht “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”; and d) the rose-fist symbol (see above). So, we are socialists, we are agitprop, we are Brechtians, we go for a dialectical, didactic, and collective approach. We back formal experimentation meeting radicalism in thought.

Our group now consists of between 15 and 20 persons; it is transgenerational, and while some of us continue our research into the events at Grini, the group is also busy building itself as a collective through exercises, songs, camaraderie, working on a webpage that helps to control the information disseminated about us. There are many challenges involved in group authorship – some members need and are looking for leadership; it is hard to distribute tasks without sounding authoritarian; decision-making takes longer. It can be said that we are aware of the difficulties of group dynamics; that we observe a mood that is both nostalgic and recognises the end time; and unavoidably, everyone is turning to what each does best and so a division of labour is emerging.

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Performance of National Episodes: Episode 1: Grini and the Futures of Norway at Påfuglen, Hammersborggata, Oslo, May 2019

The Grini Compromise RH 1 National Episodes is something slightly different from a typical Biennial project: it hopes to be a place for conversations about history and stories, narratives and narrative. Our idea originates in an analysis of the novel The Plague by Albert Camus, and the corresponding opera by Roberto Gerhard. From this, a narrative structure was extracted, one that could potentially be applied to different historical, social, political situations and events. Although they were different, they could be recounted using an identical narrative structure. And from that, the idea came that such a narrative/dramaturgical structure could be applied to a number of key events in Norwegian history. This led to the idea of National Episodes: to write and perform a series of short theatrical pieces, that would, in the Brechtian Lehrstücke tradition, speak to a wide audience about some key, pivotal moments in the history of Norway.

Of course, the idea is not to opt for some epic treatment, but on the contrary, to construct these pivotal moments, again following in the footsteps of Brecht, or even Genet, using domestic, indoor scenes that are easy to play and stage.

We will construct our first episode from an anecdote recounted by Johan Galtung on a radio show. Galtung mentions Griniforliket (“The Grini compromise”), a meeting between WWII POW representatives of the Labour party and the Conservative party that allegedly took place at barrack number 12 in the spring of 1945, at the Grini detention camp. Here, shortly before the German capitulation, the political future of Norway was mapped out.

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RH 2 We interviewed the aforementioned Johan Galtung, an expert on Norwegian cold-war history, whose father August was interned in the Grini prison camp during WWII. He is the main source of the story of the informal meetings that took place at Grini the spring of 1945. Galtung emphasises the spirit of collaboration among the prisoners who, sharing the same fate and facing a common enemy, were able to form friendships across class divides. He claims that Socialists and Conservatives struck a deal whereby the left would agree to a westward orientation in the field of foreign policy, rather than strengthening ties with the Soviet Union (it is worth noting that the Norwegian Labour Party had been a member of the Communist International until 1924, and that at the time the Grini meetings were held, the Red Army had just liberated the northern part of Norway). In return for this concession, the Conservatives pledged not to block the implementation of the Norwegian welfare state. As a result, Norway accepted US aid via the Marshall Plan, joined NATO in 1949 and has been under the sphere of American influence ever since. On the other hand, the compromise made at Grini provided the country with free education and health care, powerful labour unions and heavy taxation of the wealthy.

When North Sea oil – the source of Norway’s current riches – was discovered in 1969 (with the help of American companies), the oil industry was quickly nationalized so the proceeds would benefit all of the country’s citizens.

The Grini compromise is a fascinating story of how personal relationships between a small number of individuals had far-reaching consequences for the nation of Norway, well worthy of a theatrical adaptation. But what are we to make of it exactly? Is it a happy tale of consensusbuilding and fraternity (in stark contrast to the polarized climate of today), or a dark story of political horse-trading and the selling out of ideals?

Was the Grini compromise Norway’s salvation from Soviet totalitarianism or the early infection of an American-style individualism that is slowly eating away at the nation’s soul? Norway is one of the world’s most equal countries, but one of Europe’s toughest on immigration. How do we reconcile this contradiction?

NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

History behind Closed Doors

Avant-Garde Folklore

RH 1 Camus’s The Plague (written during WWII and published in 1947) and The Grini Compromise are contemporaneous. We are working at identifying pivotal moments of the history of Norway that shaped what Norway is today, taking into account practical challenges such as the fact that Rose Hammer is made up of about fifteen amateur dramaturges and actors and that our resources are limited; we must remain light and flexible in order to present our productions anywhere with minimal preparation. We are aiming at huis clos productions: feasible, flexible, cheap, and efficient. Another important element of all this is that we believe we have arrived at the end of the world order configured after WWII, built on a legitimacy derived from the defeat of Fascism, “built over millions of corpses”, as the Commune Eins in Berlin used to say. This is over now; and Fascism is shamelessly showing its ugly face again.

We are trying to understand the kind of world we are headed towards by re-analysing the classics that shaped our vision of the world, so post WWII, so post ’68.

RH 2 In organizing the collective we have taken several cues from the labour movements’ amateur theatre groups of the interwar years. The so-called Tramgjenger/”TRAM-gangs” originating in the Soviet Union, which became widespread in Norway in the 1930s (TRAM being an acronym for Teatr Rabotschej Molodjoshi or “The Workers’ Youth Theatre”). The TRAM-gangs were viewed as a vital tool in election campaigns and educational outreach at that time. These amateur ensembles were championed for their mobility and versatility of repertoire, ranging from singing and sketches to speech- and movement choirs. With simple means and limited props the TRAM-gangs (described as “combat groups”) could perform just as easily on a pavement as on a stage.

Needless to say, there are obvious pitfalls in leaning so heavily on past formats such as 1930s agit-prop. We may easily end up romanticizing a past that has little to do with the current social and political conditions. On the other hand, we think it worthwhile to reconnect with the folklore of Socialism in order to gain a better understanding of our own recent history. Or to put it another way: to get a feel for the chains our grandparents’ generation were able to shed, at a time when new, less tangible shackles are being forged through temp-working, disruptive technologies, increasing inequality and an unravelling of the social safety net.

Perhaps these collective measures can strengthen our own defences against the mechanisms that aim to isolate the individual from its fellow human beings.

RH 2 I hope Rose Hammer can create a space for thinking about the history and possible futures of Norwegian social democracy. As a nation, Norway has experienced an extraordinary rise in living standards within a relatively short period of time. My generation, born into prosperity and equality, are in many ways the ‘spoiled brats’ of the welfare state, oblivious to the struggles that laid the foundations of this model less than a century ago. As artists we enjoy free education and grant schemes that – at least in theory – make it possible for anyone to pursue an artistic vocation, regardless of their economic background. Many of these systems of support came into being as a result of unionized efforts, such as Kunstneraksjonen-74 (the Artists’ Action of 1974). Norwegian artists still reap the benefits of the victories won by the activism of that time. However, there is not much gratitude to be found, either within the art field or in society at large, and there is little interest in exploring modes of collectivity. In the national political debate, “socialist” is increasingly used as a derogatory term, and attacks on “Cultural Marxism” are becoming more and more frequent.

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Communal singing is as old as mankind, found in every culture, on every continent. It is a defining feature of our species for one very good reason: it brings people closer together. Allegedly, scientists studying choirs have discovered that within minutes of singing, the heartbeats of all the participants synchronize. It is fair to assume that the secular song rituals of the workers’ movements (in particular the speech choir) were modelled on Christian liturgy, and that the rituals served to fill the void that was left after God had been declared dead and the position of the Church weakened. But choral singing also embodies a collective spirit that is very much in line with the Socialist ethos. At its best, the choir can function as an equalizer, making space for a multitude of voices, and doing away with the notion of the ‘Star.’ Everyone’s contribution is the same, and everyone shares the same emotional reward. A good mixed choir is a unifying force, welcoming all genders, ages and ethnicities, and thus a potential antidote to the toxic individualism that has reigned unchecked for the past few decades.

I’d be the first to admit that this is all very dreamy and utopian. Can our ‘guerrilla troupe’ be an efficient political weapon in the age of Trumpist social media? Probably not. But as the ghost of nationalism is once again rearing its ugly head in Europe, reviving the anti-fascist theatre of the past is a small first step towards overcoming our own paralysis. As artists we cannot do much more than flap our butterfly wings and hope for the best. It is not as if Brecht’s plays and poems were much of an obstacle to the tanks rolling into Poland in 1939 either…

So yes, we are engaging with the increasing interest among artists in “the training camp as a form.” In my view, the exercise in thinking, acting and speaking together with one voice is of equal importance to whatever work we end up producing.

At the very least, perhaps we can develop a few survival skills while making our feeble contribution to the cultural resistance effort. Hopefully it will be a learning experience for everyone involved, and who knows, maybe some seeds will be planted among the participants that can grow into fruition in the future, even long after Rose Hammer has ceased to exist.

ROSE HAMMER

The Future Is Unwritten

Performance of National Episodes: Episode 1: Grini and the Futures of Norway at Påfuglen, Hammersborggata, Oslo, May 2019

Pleasure among the Eternal Returns of the Worse RH 1 I hear Don Fabrizio Corbera say: “Everything must change so that everything can stay the same”.

But even if we seem to be living a Groundhog Day, we fear things are spiralling towards disaster.

But it is a good experiment and I cannot help thinking that we are building a classical structure for survival, a training camp for the Apocalypse, although perhaps we are more preoccupied with building (or recognising) the imaginary of this Apocalypse than with creating any really effective means of survival. We always keep in mind the subtitle from Dr Strangelove: How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb. We are both apocalyptic and integrated.

You could say that we want to become a secret society aimed not only at surviving, but at surviving with a smile. In Fahrenheit 451, people did not read books because they wanted to bring down the totalitarian system – they read them first and foremost for the pleasure of reading. Pleasure, if anything, will bring down the system. We are working for pleasure. The pleasure of being together, the pleasure in referring to the authors we love, the comfort of poetry, the pleasure of constructing a solid, believable, well structured, formally coherent, self-assured, beautiful performance.

That is our job. It is not our job to turn Fascists into Communists or propose an alternative to neoliberalism. We should bear always in mind that we are aiming first and foremost for a well-built form, for a form of intelligent poetry. The rest will come by itself. Or not.

NATIONAL EPISODES: GRINI AND THE FUTURES OF NORWAY

RH 2 In attempting to imagine a brighter future, I sense that the runaway train of economic growth is (to mix metaphors) the elephant in the room. Of course, any political project worth its salt should aim to secure a dignified existence for all, should work against exploitation and guarantee food, shelter and other basic necessities. But in 2019 as standards of living are improving in many of the world’s ‘developing countries,’ it is painfully clear that the frenzied consumerism we have embraced in the West is not sustainable on a global level.

Holding onto our lavish way of life while denying others the same privileges is of course criminally unjust. It seems to us that there is no morally valid way forward other than drastically cutting back our own consumption.

Besides, is fighting for the middle-class right to carry on shopping really what we should be doing? Trump branded himself as the saviour of American workers, promising that under his leadership they would all get ‘rich.’ Shouldn’t we be asking ourselves how to make everyone – and especially the Trumps of this world – content with less? It goes without saying that a voluntary ‘austerity program’ will never succeed as long as the top one percent keeps lining their pockets at the expense of the vast majority. No one would or should accept lower wages or less job security if the only effects of these measures—as is often the case today—is increased economic inequality.

Sacrifices must be made willingly and be duly compensated for, not in monetary value, but in other, less quantifiable types of reward.

RH 1 I want to say that today’s youth – at least in Europe, in Brussels, in Spain – is actually very politically active and concerned and they now demonstrate every Friday. They already know they will never be rich, so why bother? They are more afraid of death than of being poor. They are applying strategies of survival and they are profoundly anti-fascist. Perhaps they are not the majority, but we were not a majority 20 or 30 years ago either.

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ROSE HAMMER

For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, Tan responds to the Biennial premises located at Myntgata 2, which has recently opened 60 artist studios subsidised by the City of Oslo and housed under the same roof as osloBIENNALEN. Her project is an intervention in the building, which anticipates a place where unknown but vital relationships between artists will form.

ONGOING FROM MAY 2019

LISA TAN OTHER ARTISTS

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

POSTCARDS AND RENOVATION OF PUBLIC ACCESSIBLE TOILETS LOCATION

MYNTGATA 2 STATUS

ONGOING

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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LISA TAN (1973, USA) lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is an artist and Professor of Fine Art at Konstfack, University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Her practice explores the relationship between image and language in the formation of individual subjectivity. Using video, photography, text, and other gestures, her work is shaped by aspects of mundane life, friendship, and loss; and also through her intense research into different fields of study such as literary theory and ontology.

How do we value the spaces in which our most private activities happen? Lisa Tan’s project for osloBIENNALEN involves refurbishing the old and chilly toilets at Myntgata 2, where about fifty artists have their studios and where the biennial has its headquarters. Tan is using the allocated budget to improve the toilets. What do we make of this quiet gesture that does not point to the art that is made by the artists who work in the building but rather to the unremarkable toilet break that happens while their work is being done?

Tan is making the improvement to reflect on the connections made between artists. Throughout history, artists have made works in reaction to and inspired by other artists. This is expressed in a text she has written and printed on cards that can be taken from racks near the toilets.

Connection – and the inspiration that it can lead to, often happens in an instant – perhaps passing a colleague on the stairs on the way to use the toilets. You too are welcome to use the toilets at Myntgata 2, and be sure to take a card on the way.

LISA TAN

OTHER ARTISTS

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Josh Shaddock TAKE THE STAIRS Josh Shaddock lives and works in New York, USA. He is an artist and writer, and a friend and colleague of Lisa Tan. In this essay on Tan’s project for osloBIENNALEN he draws on his own everyday life.

Lisa Tan’s project for osloBIENNALEN consists of: (1) renovation of the outdated public restrooms located on each landing of the central staircase of Myntgata 2, a building housing 60 artist’s studios; (2) a printed card with a text by Lisa about artists looking at other artists, placed in literature racks in the same central staircase, to be taken and read by resident artists and visitors.

Lisa and I are friends, and have been talking about this project for some time. In the course of our discussions, I was brought on to design the card (I’m a graphic designer most days). So, I was well aware of the parameters, her thinking, and how it had all evolved. But then I was invited to write a text about it. This text. And that was another matter (I’m not a writer most days). Public/workplace bathrooms, art studios, artistic influence, art labor, printed matter, reading. Such vast and divergent territories to navigate–so much that could be said. I said yes.

The first day of writing. After dropping off my kids at school and finishing a bit of design work, I start by going to the library at a nearby university.

A quiet place, removed from interruption and surrounded by information. I had only been to this library a few times, so I wasn’t familiar with the hushed corners for study, but after about a half-hour of distracted wandering (and a trip to the restroom) I found a carrel and began.

The bathroom itself. A structure for talking about artistic influence? Toilet (evacuation), sink and trash can (sanitation), vanity mirror (grooming). Artists ingest, digest, incorporate what’s nutritious, expel what’s not, clean-up, and make it presentable. No… hacky metaphor.

But keep on with the toilet. The anal stage in Freud’s psychosexual development? What about that again? Retentive/Expulsive? The ego develops then, right? A few books from the shelf (and more distracted browsing)… and yes, that’s it. I guess it relates to artists and how they work and keep their workspaces, but it’s a thin connection. What about toilets in contemporary art? Duchamp, Manzoni, Warhol’s silver commode in the Factory rest/darkroom, Gober, Sarah Lucas, Cattelan’s recent gold-plated fixture at the Guggenheim, Tom Burr (a key reference for Lisa’s project), Franz West, Tom Sachs, Lawrence Weiner’s “Us and Them,” Arneson, Bonvicini, Slominski… I love this game and could go on and on. But what does this have to do with Lisa’s project?

Not a great start, three hackneyed dead-ends.

It was now early afternoon and I was hungry and a little frustrated. I had skipped lunch. Then I noticed I was missing an essay by Tom Burr that Lisa cited in her text. I message her to ask for it. She sends the Burr essay, I tell her I’m at the library, and then I ask her if it’s OK to be funny in the text, already nervously hoping to find a way to improve my writing with shit jokes. She says yes. I’m tired and I remember I need to pick up my son soon, so I decide to stop. On the way out of the library, I get trapped by the lure of the stacks again, lose track of time, and have to rush to make it to his school. Then it’s home, more design work, cooking dinner, straightening up the house, and getting the kids ready for bed. In the evening, I comb through my shelves and make a stack in my office of whatever books might be useful (too many) and prepare to return to writing the next day, Wednesday. But then I remember that my wife is going on a work trip that will last through the weekend and I worry whether I’ll have the time or energy to write. I don’t. I try, but I fail.

On Monday, I return to work. But over the next several days, the cycle of everyday disruptions and fruitless research continues – and my confusion and irritation compound.

OTHER ARTISTS

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I read about the history of sanitation systems, the impact of toilets and clean water on public health (miraculous), personal hygiene, the architecture of public toilets (Norway, it turns out, has the one voted most beautiful in the world, on the Helgelandskysten scenic route), labor rights and bathroom breaks, gender politics and public restrooms, and the common habit of reading on the toilet. The last of these has a long but poorlyrecorded history, the most recent development being the smartphone as the medium of choice. I find literary depictions of people reading on the toilet.

A highlight: Joyce’s depiction of Bloom reading a magazine column and then wiping his bottom with a torn-away section. I read through texts on the artist’s studio and art labor; writings by artists about other artists and artistic influence; look at photographs and films of artists in their studios […]

There’s a lot more. And I was going to continue, but my three-year-old son just jumped onto my desk and asked to watch drum solos on YouTube.

Forty noisy minutes later, I’m writing again.

My office is in my house, so I’m used to this sort of disruption. I’ll be immersed in typesetting and moments later making chocolate milk or helping my daughter with math homework. The time spent working on this text has been nothing exceptional in this regard: transporting kids to and from school/ activities, cooking, design work/meetings, laundry, yardwork, taking my daughter to the doctor, phone calls from my mom. Working at home provides little resistance to the intrusions of private life.

While understandable, and even beneficial, they can be exasperating when time and focus are required. Add to this a congestion of the words and thoughts of others that seemed increasingly irreconcilable and distant from the task at hand.

Despair set in. Despair of mundane duties that take me away from my work and of research that fails to produce work. The deadline is two days away. I reevaluate and start over.

Lisa’s project consists of: (1) a moment of everyday life made more pleasant; (2) a reverie on artists looking at other artists.

LISA TAN

Lisa’s project is a quiet gesture that shifts focus away from work, away from the studio spaces of Myntgata 2, into the transitional spaces and activities of the staircase. The restroom–warm, clean, efficient, and soothing–allows one to stop, reflect, breathe. And being the gesture of another artist, it takes on a feeling of collegial care. The text recounts the connections that informed its own writing and is an open reflection and appreciation of the connections between artists across social, physical, and historical space. It makes no precise claims and gives no advice, it merely acknowledges the prevalence and importance of these connections, to itself and at large. It’s freely available to artists and visitors as they move between floors, to read now or later, to be kept and read again.

Lisa Tan, Other Artists in Myntgata 2

Lisa and I are friends, and have been talking about art and life for some time. Our discussions about TV, books, tennis, politics, and just about everything else have rarely been directed towards achieving a direct result or goal. It’s a freewheeling dialogue that delights in what we each bring and what we take away together. It drifts untroubled around the obligations and schedules of work and life. It washes over us; never tasked to perform work, never resentful of disruption or delay, never privileging one sphere of life over another. It is a model of openness and generosity embodied in her project for osloBIENNALEN, one I paradoxically lost sight of while working on this text.

This shift in focus counteracts the distortions and offers the broader possibility that there is no center; that all parts of life–work, study, friends, exercise, family, sleep, eating, reading, bathing, travelling, conversation, money, all of it–derive their value from our being present to what they are and how they are connected. They don’t serve one another and they are not opposed; they are not divisions of a whole, but nodes in a network; and the maximum capacity of each is realized though balance.

The modesty and inconspicuousness of Lisa’s project is faithful to her point. Understanding and maintaining this sort of balance requires attention to the small things and moments that make up most of life and hold it all together. No artist comes to this building for the staircase, they come to work. But no artist works without taking the stairs.

It’s so easy to place work at the center, as I did. And doing so has a distorting effect on all that surrounds it. Everything is counted as either contributing or detracting. The duties of life outside of work, however significant or mundane, are irritating and breed resentment, because they are non-work. Encounters with other artists, whether social or art historical, are judged for their usefulness, and so tend to be either ignored or instrumentalized. Like all positive feedback loops, it is all-consuming and unstable.

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COMPLETED

BY OCTOBER 2019 GAYLEN GERBER SUPPORTS

MARIANNE HEIER AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

MICHAEL ROSS

GAYLEN GERBER MARIANNE HEIER MICHAEL ROSS ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN

TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES)

ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN POWER LINE HUM (COMPOSITION FOR THE ORGAN IN OSLO CITY HALL) POWER BALANCE (COMPOSITION FOR PIANO, ALTERNATING CURRENT AND ORCHESTRA)

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, Gerber presented a selection of works at Edvard Munch’s studio in Ekely, and a new work using the German Barracks in Myntgata quarter in the centre of Oslo as a point of departure.

COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 2019

GAYLEN GERBER SUPPORTS

What happens when something is painted a neutral color like grey or white? Gaylen Gerber’s oeuvre is very much about value. In brief, his project entitled Supports, which was ongoing from May to September, involved identifying objects and painting them. The surface of an old object is imbued with history, tradition and memories. Painting it grey or white instantly obscures these qualities and the existing surface’s distinctive identification only to ensure that its history, including its form re-emerge more clearly. These found objects are not only elevated to the status of art; overpainting them means that we see them in a different way from before. During osloBIENNALEN, Gerber showed a selection of Supports in Edvard Munch’s studio at Ekely and in the Myntgata neighbourhood in Oslo city centre.

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

EXHIBITION AND OUTDOOR WORK LOCATION

EDVARD MUNCH’S WINTER STUDIO AT EKELY AND IN THE MYNTGATA QUARTER STATUS

ENDED, SEPTEMBER 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

GAYLEN GERBER (1955, USA) creates expressive, often revealing artworks and situations that incorporate the work of other makers, sometimes by foregrounding them and other times by seemingly obscuring them. For several years, Gerber’s practice has been characterised by a fusion of his own work with that of another, making them inseparable but equally present.

This remains palpable in Supports, presented in osloBIENNALEN First Edition, where the viewer encounters forms that carry immediate as well as existing meanings simultaneously. Gerber maintains an ongoing tension by constantly renewing the relation between what is presented and how it is presented.

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SUPPORT, N.N. ACRYLIC PAINT ON BARRACKS, GERMAN, OSLO, 1940-1945

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Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen SYMPHONY IN GREY Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen is a historian, professor and writer based in Oslo and Bodø. In this essay he writes about Gaylen Gerber’s Support series based on the cultural history of colours.

The cultural history of the grey shade is colourful.

Let us begin in earliest modernity with the English philosopher-scientist Francis Bacon, who lived around the year 1600. In his utopian novel The New Atlantis he describes an involuntary journey to the imaginary ideal society Bensalem, which is led by scientists who devote all their efforts to the creation of new technology and progress in the natural sciences, starting from controlled experiments. Much is as one would expect in a book written by a philosopher who is often called “the father of modernity.” But something is also quite different, and that has to do with colours.

The first scientist the narrator meets arrives in a chariot without wheels, draped in blue velvet with gold embroideries “and two footmen on each side in the like attire.” “The chariot was all of cedar, gilt, and adorned with crystal; save that the fore-end had panels of sapphires, set in borders of gold; and the hinder-end the like of emeralds of the Peru colour....The chariot was covered with cloth of gold tissued upon blue. He had before him fifty attendants, young men all, in white satin loose coats to the mid leg.”

The scientist, we are told, is dressed in a robe of fine black cloth, with wide sleeves and a cape. His trousers are of white linen, he wears remarkable gloves studded with jewels, and shoes in peachcoloured velvet, while his hat is as round as a Spanish montera.

As a philosopher of science, Bacon was well ahead of his time but the aesthetics and the human relations in the New Atlantis were those of his own time. When Bacon wanted to enhance the power and legitimacy of science, he dressed the scientists up in colourful and costly robes of the type that princes and nobles used in the Renaissance.

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Now we move three hundred years forward in time, to the USA during the Great Depression at the beginning of the 1930s. For a short period, while tens of millions were unemployed, Howard Scott and his mass movement Technocracy Inc. stole the biggest headlines. The movement’s analysis and programme predicted that the market economy was facing collapse and that engineers and researchers should control the economy using a system of “objective” prices, based on how much energy was required to produce a commodity. Like Bacon, Scott too was preoccupied with colours. But now it was no longer the diversity and intensity of colours that were to express the power of science.

Scott’s technocrats instead wore grey uniforms and arranged motorized demonstrations where all the vehicles, including the iconic yellow school buses, were painted over in grey.

The visions of Francis Bacon and Howard Scott have much in common. Both imagine a society where scientific expertise directs development and where technology liberates people from need and worry. In the course of the three hundred years that separate them, however, something drastic has happened to the semiotics of colour, and especially the ability of the grey shades to express rank and power.

In pre-modern and early modern European society it was often determined by law who was allowed to wear strong colours such as red, purple, blue, black and yellow. These were colours that were difficult to obtain in nature, which had to be manufactured in costly processes, and which were therefore reserved for the most powerful people in society. Peasants and paupers dressed in grey, which was the colour of undyed wool. The Franciscans, who reacted against the wealth and luxury of the Church, and wanted to live modestly like the first Christians, were called Greyfriars.

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Oil paint on mirror with gilt frame from the Kennedy Winter White House, Palm Beach, Florida, mid-20th century, installation view

Besides being a philosopher and natural scientist, Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England with the title Viscount St. Alban. He lived in a society where communication mainly took place face to face, not at a distance through communication media. To be effective, power had to be made present in the situation. This created a mode of being that we would today call theatrical. The nobleman’s attributes stood for power. This applied to the sword, the armour and the coat of arms, but also to cosmetics and wigs, the colourful coats and cloaks, the breeches, the thin hose and the high heels, along with the balletic way of moving learned in the fencing hall and on the dance floor. The peasants wore clogs, noblemen strutted around in high-heeled slippers and were called “the high and mighty.” Modern societies like ours, as well as the one Howard Scott lived in, have reacted against this kind of rhetoric of power. Power relations are determined by money, legal codices, academic degrees and job titles, not by who wears the most showy robes. Power is something one has by virtue of belonging to a larger, invisible apparatus. Titles and positions remain constant regardless of the situation. The risk that the doctor may be degraded to a nurse or the professor to an assistant is not at stake.

GAYLEN GERBER

We see them in the white coats of the health institutions and in the grey or beige costumes of the world of business and politics. The cultural elite for its part trusts in black, a colour which for centuries has been associated with the spiritual, with priests and professors, magicians and judges.

The relationship between system and individual is subtle in the monochrome cultures of modernity.

Howard Scott’s Technocracy Inc. never became much more than a curiosity. Technocratic power is in fact invisible. The idea of bringing it out into the light of day with grey uniforms and grey-painted vehicles and objects was a great misunderstanding, politically speaking. Technocracy Inc used grey in an ostentatious manner, which meant that it lost its ability to symbolize the anonymous apparatus. Above all, Scott and his followers lacked an understanding of the interplay between individuality and system in modernity.

The businessman’s grey and the cultural elite’s black are only uniforms in an ironic sense, they leave scope for individual expression, while at the same time the ‘uniform’ signals a connection with the structures of power. The use of uniforms by Technocracy Inc in the 1930s followed the pattern of the fascist movements in Italy and Germany, but without the fascist cult of the Führer and sense of personal charisma.

Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019 installation view

In modern societies the culture of colour is therefore quite different from what it was in the Renaissance.

Power must still be expressed and symbolized, but it is not done by way of the rare and bombastic, rather by way of the monochrome and neutral.

The power of capital is expressed through the businessman’s grey clothing, that of science through the doctor’s white coat. This reversal happened in the wake of the great French Revolution towards the end of the 1700s. A symbolic change occurred in the 1830s, when Louis Philippe, the last king of France, appeared in a grey suit and with shoes that were suitable for walking.

The power attributes of the aristocracy had not gone, but had emigrated to the feminine domain and to art. The power rhetoric of the Baroque became the gender rhetoric of bourgeois society.

The attributes of the nobility lived on as symbols of femininity: colourful robes, wigs, make-up and high-heeled shoes. Even the musical instruments of the court, the harp and piano, which had been forbidden in the time of Robespierre, were passed on in the 1800s as part of the practice of femininity.

Ironically, bourgeois feminine culture drew on the traditions of the nobility’s masculine warrior ethos.

In visual art, the colours and the pre-scientific myths lived on: with the Impressionists, the Symbolists and the Fauvists.

In the twentieth century, the monochrome became the new power rhetoric. And thus it also became a theme in art, which has always been interested in the rhetoric of power. The monochrome as gesture in painting was invented around 1920 by the Russians Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko. In the heyday of modernist painting around the middle of the twentieth century Robert Rauschenberg worked with black or white surfaces and Yves Klein with blue. Early in the 1960s Jasper Johns painted a long series of monochromes in grey, exploring the melancholia of the grey shades.

Since then, this too has changed. Neither the modern woman nor art is content to be purely decorative or to feed daydreams. Women seek power and this leads them too to the monochrome.

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Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019, installation view

For Oslobiennalen, Gaylen Gerber has contributed new works in his series Supports. Objects that carry with them strong, deep meanings from their original cultural and historical contexts are painted over in grey or white and exhibited together. In the Oslo Myntgata neighbourhood he has covered the large old German barracks with grey. This is the last example of this kind of wartime architecture remaining in the centre of Oslo. The authorities have said no to protecting the building, pointing to the fact that similar buildings will be preserved at nearby Ormsund and Hovedøya. The artist is free to do what he wants with the barracks, since it is to be excised from history anyway. But what will happen to the building now that Gerber has marked it out as art? Will it still be demolished?

The elegant Art Deco studio that Edvard Munch had built at Ekely remains in use on a daily basis as a studio for artists. Here Gerber is exhibiting Supports. These may be works by other contemporary artists, cult objects or popular-culture icons, which the artist picks out and paints over in institutional white or grey. And thus the artist combines two of the most important gestures in contemporary art since Malevich and Duchamp: monochrome and ready-made or ‘found art.’ Duchamp incorporated objects from everyday life – a urinal or a bottle rack – into art by putting them on pedestals. In a way Gerber does the opposite. He ejects art objects from art by letting them borrow the grey and white authority of power. But the paradoxes pile up here, for this is done as art and within the art system.

GAYLEN GERBER

Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019, installation view

The word ‘support’ comes from the Latin verb supportare, which means to transfer or transport. It is a compound of sub (under) and portare (to carry) and thus strictly speaking means not to carry over, but to carry under!

What is it that is carried under Gerber’s grey?

What do these Supports carry with them from their mythical and often non-western contexts, when they now stand in the studio of the great western modernist Edvard Munch? Do they lose authenticity and meaning? A Chinese statuette from the Ming dynasty, a fetish head from the Brazilian interior, a bench designed by Alfred Loos, a film box from Walt Disney, pottery made by indigenous North Americans in the 1800s, a 1500-year-old Indian woman’s bust and a similar work from Nigeria in the twentieth century, a 3-4,000-year-old plaque from Mesopotamia and a work by Darren Bader from 2014 stand side by side, all enveloped in the same ‘neutral’ colours.

What happens to these artworks from many cultures when Gerber paints them over with his responsive, sensitive strokes? Do they share in modernity’s anonymous rational power, in the grey of capital and the white of science? In that case, though, it is ironic that the objects remain art to an even greater extent after Gerber’s colour treatment. History and magic retreat into the background, but form is foregrounded.

We see the formal similarities – and differences – among objects that otherwise lack a common defining character.

But then there is something more. Gerber is a Chicago artist, and there is something about the grey shade with which he covers the objects that makes me think of the dirty big city snow in which people in the winter cities of Chicago and Oslo trample around for large parts of the year. The association goes to snow, not ice. Ice and snow are both frozen water; the chemical formula is identical. People who live in regions with mild winters often hardly distinguish between ice and snow. It is different for those who come from snowy cities like Chicago and Oslo; for them ice and snow have a different phenomenology. Ice is cold and sharp, snow is balmy and protective. If you get lost in the mountains you can dig down into the snow and keep warm. Ice cancels out time. Snow, on the other hand, stands for oblivion, sometimes also for reconciliation and hope. It covers tracks and creates a new, virginal terrain.

The art institution has traditionally taken the side of ice against snow. Art is lifted out of time, one ‘freezes’ it by covering the painting with glass and putting the object in a display case. Gerber does not freeze the object; rather, he lets it disappear into the city’s dirty snow. At Myntgata this is done with a site-specific object, an anonymous piece of architecture erected by Adolf Hitler’s army during the Second World War. The history of the building is associated with pain and conflict.

German barracks were often set up with slave labour. After World War II and during the Cold War, the building was used by the Norwegian military intelligence service, which probably carried out top secret operations from there. The ghosts of the past echo through this provisional facility, which has stood for so long. Packed in city snow in the middle of summer, it is as if the building at last finds a kind of peace.

SUPPORT, N.N. ACRYLIC PAINT ON BARRACKS, GERMAN, OSLO, 1940-1945

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For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, Heier performed her project And Their Spirits Live On, first at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and then at Oslo’s former Museum of Contemporary Art.

COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 2019

MARIANNE HEIER AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

MARIANNE HEIER (1969, Norway) is an artist educated and based in Milan and Oslo. Her work is often connected to the tradition of institutional critique, but emerges out of personal engagement and lived experience, rather than a strategic, calculated practice. Questions related to economics and value circulation are central to Heier’s practice, with the inherent power of the gift as a recurring theme. She questions the obvious and invites other interpretations and possibilities. The results are presented as performances, installations, textbased and other types of spatial interventions.

How can a centuries-old plaster cast of a twothousand-year-old sculpture speak to us today?

Plaster copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures have formed the basis for much of the history of art. Right up until modern times artists in the western tradition learned to draw and shape works from such models. When the National Gallery was built, the central building housed a collection of these classical plaster casts. Marianne Heier has chosen to make a performance among the plaster copies at the Academy of Art in Milan where she herself studied, and later in the empty bank premises which until recently housed the Museum of Contemporary Art – drawing attention to the potential power in these figures. They are archetypes that we still refer to, although we are often unaware of this. Heier’s performance takes the form of a museum guided tour in which she takes the role of guide, situating the plaster sculptures in wider histories. Using texts taken from classi­cal mythology and political resistance movements, she shows the potentially radical possibilities of the sculptures. The mythology from which these classical figures are taken is full of critiques of power, gender issues and identity politics that perhaps suggest a need for civil courage in the political climate of our own times.

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

PERFORMANCE COLLABORATORS

ACCADEMIA DI BELLE ARTI DI BRERA AND THE PROJECT SCHOOL IN OSLO LOCATION

THE FORMER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART DATES

26/05, 28/05, 30/05, 1/06/2019 STATUS

ENDED, JUNE 2019

The performance was co-curated by osloBIENNALEN curators and Alessandra Pioselli and was produced in collaboration with students and employees at the Project School in Oslo.

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

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Line Ulekleiv POROUS MATERIAL, ACTIVE ACTIONS Line Ulekleiv is an art historian educated at the University of Oslo and a writer, critic and editor. In her essay for osloBIENNALEN she writes about Marianne Heier’s performance And Their Spirits Live On at the former Museum of Contemporary Art.

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For Marianne Heier, art is something we have within us, like a backbone. It represents an inherent possibility of change, action and awareness. Art has a continuous potential and an unconsummated becoming. In Heier’s practice, historic art is seen with a new, activating gaze, forced out of rigid abstraction and stylistic regimes. With poetry and energy, the gaze can be liberated from fixed habits and thus discover neglected linkages.

And Their Spirits Live On is a guided, performative tour presented for the first time in Milan, then in Oslo during the opening week of Oslobiennalen First Edition. In the work, the idea of sculpture as reproduction is associated with the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, where Heier was an art student in the 90s. Heier’s point of departure is a series of colossal plaster sculptures placed in the corridors of the Accademia building. The performance in Oslo, which takes place in the abandoned premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Bankplassen, is an echo of the performance in Milan and shows images of these sculptures projected in various parts of the main hall.

The idea is Heier’s principal form, played out in performances, objects and films. Nevertheless the material is never ‘immaterial’ in her work – on the contrary it forms a crystalline core.

She has among other things immured a genuine diamond in the facade wall of Bergen Kunsthall, as an image of the relentlessly hard resistance of art to the market (Diamond, 2012), and exhibited a meteorite from space, acquired on eBay (The Guest, 2015). The silent material was presented here as a guest in time and space, diverted from its cosmic path. The often-concentrated mythical materials to which Heier turns her attention are in effect equally porous, in Walter Benjamin’s sense1.

The material bears within it conceptual hollows and openings, labyrinthine passages not refilled with absolute meanings. The porous as principle sustains a theatre of unpredictable constellations and an openness to new interpretations.

They are all casts of famous sculptures, ranging from Greek sculptures of the 450s BC to the Michelangelo works of the Italian Renaissance.

Many of these casts, in museum quality, were given as gifts by Napoleon, and have long been in use as a standard repertoire in classic academy teaching.

At the time they were models – and that was that.

They have remained standing there, simply too big to be moved into storage. In the corridors, paradoxically, the monumental sculptures can be overlooked – the everyday exhibition space makes them seem everyday and invisible. Since the 1700s students have toddled unruffled past Athene and Hercules with the greatest matterof-factness.

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Reproductions in plaster of Greek and Roman sculptures were an obligatory part of the drawing lessons at the historical art academies. Admiration of antiquity was for a long time absolute, and Greek art was the Holy Grail. Politically, its cultivation reached an imperialistic high point at the beginning of the 1800s when Lord Elgin moved sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis to England, where they ended up at the British Museum, washed shining white. The so-called Elgin Marbles brought with them an endless succession of plaster copies, annexed fragments in new ideological and cultural frameworks of meaning.

2 Heier has used antiquity as a source and metaphorical resonance for the contemporary before, not least in the exhibition Orpheus at Kunstnernes Hus in 2013, when the background was the financial crisis in Europe. This was concretized not least in a 2,400-yearold Greek coin, a video titled Orpheus, which showed the staging and performance of an extract from Monteverdi’s opera in front of the Oslo Stock Exchange, and a spiral staircase that the public could ascend (Eurydice).

1 Walter Benjamin described Naples as a “porous city”, in as much as it could absorb heterogeneity. For Benjamin the porous stone that forms Naples was also an image of the city’s social and public life, including a rich underlying network which, through dynamic improvisation and fluid boundaries between inside and outside, old and new, counteracts absolute walls and fixed solidity.

AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

The sculptures at the Accademia come from a mythology whose meaning has faded. But GraecoRoman mythology is still a collective body of material of which we all to some extent share cultural ownership. It continues to metamorphose in all its grand-scale extravagance. For over two thousand years, the view of antiquity has been about reconstruction, an unceasing montage of fragments and bits and pieces. Metamorphosis is the very soul of antiquity, as in the Roman poet Ovid’s mythological poem Metamorphoses. The myths are about transformations involving gods and heroes – but Ovid also transformed the content of the myths, and the legacy of among others Homer. The epic material has no constancy, and the Graeco-Roman gods are an unruly, stubborn lot. They are initiators of plots and injustices, ruled by lust, revenge and madness – beyond any morality. Figures and ghosts from the past stand ready to breathe life into new situations, concealed behind historical masks.2

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MARIANNE HEIER

Marianne Heier, And Their Spirits Live On, performance at the former Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, May June 2019

The plaster sculptures express a pedagogical principle where clarity of form and idea trumps materiality. Precision is made possible without the weight and tactility inherent in marble or bronze.

The collection of such casts could be made close to complete, something that is an impossibility with the originals3. For example, the National Museum owns 800 of these casts, including Day and Night by Michelangelo, which are also in the Brera monumental collection, and consequently in Heier’s performance (Night).

The museum-oriented way of thinking subjects art to a constructed order with a linear logic that stabilizes and harmonizes. By definition the plaster copy lacks authenticity and genuineness, qualities we automatically expect from art. It is necessarily secondary, empty, an anachronistic form in which one can truly sense the “distaste for plaster.”4 But, as set up here in the marginal zone of the academy, can it tell us something today? Can this gallery of roles, with its long-overlooked bodies and unheard voices, be aroused from torpor and set in motion?

AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

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In the Milanese corridors, Heier uses the sculptures that more or less arbitrarily stand there, boldly and without beating about the bush, borrowing quotations and postures from a conglomerate of scattered sources. These are brought together into a hybrid composition, which tumultuously and emotionally steps into the closed-off chambers of the past. A dislocating cavalcade of motions arises, with touches of the pop concert and experimental theatre. Moments are frozen and electrical, and the sculptures are transformed into narrating and symbolic actors, lose themselves in their own symbolic lustre, struggle and die. Like the plaster casts, this is a composite manifestation with no core, and follows no art-historical chronology.

When the performance is executed in the now abandoned premises of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Heier appears together with Marie Askeland Gundersen. The building is no longer in use as the nation’s institutionally most ponderous exhibition space for contemporary art, and marks a vacuum pending the coming of the new National Museum. Now the building’s interior is a ruin, with demolished walls, with no other content than its own temporal features and traces of bygone operations. Have all those years of art left an imprint on the building, a kind of image memorial? Images of the sculptures in Italy are projected on the wall – reproductions that can be said to function as the casts of our own time, spectral and disembodied. They are here as visual ideas, but are physically and materially absent.

The emptiness in the hollow plaster bodies finds a parallel in the ephemeral image that is projected for the occasion, activated in clear contrast to the performance’s emphasis on theatrical bodies full of willpower, set in motion.

The goddesses make their entry: Flora and Athene with Medusa’s head hanging around her neck, with snakes as hair and a gaze that petrifies everyone who looks at her. Heier herself becomes Medusa, and the viewer looks danger in the eye.

The mythical women become a reflection of power and powerlessness, extraterrestrial explosive force and imposed limitations.

Bodily strength works together with excess – mimed

by Heier’s physique – male for the occasion – with a stylized and padded chest. A massive, muscular Hercules leans against his club. A faun sleeps off a Dionysian intoxication, with legs akimbo.

Of all the sculptures at Brera this is the most vandalized, covered with inscriptions. Many of the figures frequent a transitional zone between categories and genders; dichotomies lose their sharp contours. Heier’s progress cultivates the wanton comedy of the masque. But through repetitions and exorcisms, an existential abyss is also suggested. The copy and the original meet in the phantasm, and create an intricate interplay between different levels of fiction.

Heier performs in both places with a chorus of students, from Brera and the Project School in Oslo respectively, equipped with upper bodies in plastic, bulging like tourist gladiators. Through these walks with the public, Heier effects a distortion of the academic tradition that lies behind the sculptures in Milan, which thus become utility sculptures elevated exponentially. They become copies of copies of copies. The projected images at the same time become history represented, as enduring as light and shade. Gods, heroes and masterworks from the history of art thus become the starting point for a further profanation, staged and shaken up.

In Heier’s hands the plaster sculptures are props, vitalized by dramatization and interpretation – they can inflame and inspire.

3 See Mari Lending, «Spøkelsesmuseer – Arkitektonisk gipsskulptur», Agora no. 3, 2010, pp. 36-55.

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The chorus can be compared to partisan singing, as a continuation of ancient Greek theatre. For Heier, the voice becomes a metaphor for civil courage and collective alliances. Daring to use one’s voice means everything. A roman lion in relief symbolizes courage and strength. Heier’s narrative collage borrows its title from the resistance movement Die Weiße Rose, a non-violent group of students in Munich during World War II who wrote and distributed pamphlets against Hitler and the Nazi regime. They knew they would not survive, but lived according to Goethe’s motto: “Be yourself, despite all resistance!”5 Some must sacrifice themselves, stand fearless and erect.

There is great flexibility in Heier’s open, playful form, in which she rummages supplely around.

The associative guided tour becomes in itself a sculptural form, a mobile social sculpture which reflects transformation as motif, and long expanses of time from the contemporary to antiquity. It insists on taking back what is demonstrably ours: the thought behind the material, the impulse behind the form and the courage behind the action.

5 http://www.aktive-fredsreiser.no/biblioteket/ biografier/sophie_hans_scholl.htm

Lending, p. 41.

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Martin Braathen REMOVALS Martin Braathen is an architect, editor-in-chief, writer and freelance curator based in Oslo.

He writes the story of Bankplassen 4, a site that has housed both Christiania Theater, the Norges Bank, and, until recently, the Museum of Contemporary Art.

2016 In 2016, Even Smith Wergeland, Johanne Borthne, Vilhelm Christensen and I produced a documentary project City of Dislocation, in which we surveyed a number of cultural buildings. These were in the process of being evacuated and emptied of their previous functions. The National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the Deichman Central Library and the Munch Museum were among fourteen cultural institutions, all of which were to be removed from the buildings they had occupied for many years. These five became our primary objects of study. The project culminated in an exhibition and a debate programme under the auspices of the predecessor of Oslobiennalen, Oslo Pilot, in the spring of 2016.

The aim of the project was not only to show that the evacuation of high-quality buildings without concrete plans for their use afterwards constituted a poor use of resources. It was just as important to discuss the fact that these major evacuations were happening all at once without a coherent overall plan. The parallel moving processes were never considered together as a whole, and neither the urban-developmental, social or economic consequences of this major ‘reshuffle’ had been analysed – although ‘reshuffle’ is possibly the wrong word, since no direct exchange was involved in any case – only the removal of vibrant cultural nodes from various neighbourhoods.

The dynamic behind the evacuations was ideological and political. Consolidation and concentration make public enterprises more efficient, at the same time strengthening the city as a tourist destination. The vision of the ‘Fjord City’ included a belt of new buildings signalling culture along the sea front, where the Central Library, the Munch Museum and the combined National Museum were to grace the waterfront along with the Opera.

Just as the main street Karl Johans gate once took the city centre away from the ‘Quadrature’, and before that the Quadrature had created a new focal point, the Fjord City was to establish a new centre in Oslo. The Fjord City’s consolidation of economic power in the Barcode project and Aker Brygge, and of cultural power through the major art institutions, was important in creating a true centre of gravity.

AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

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In the wake of this process, there were now several empty buildings that had once enjoyed great prestige.

Buildings that had explicitly set out to express their time and manifest their function in public space – the outcome of high-profile architectural competitions and high public expectation. One of these was the 110-year-old building on the square Bankplassen.

1990 An old-fashioned voice-over accompanied the TV audience into the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art in 1990. The public were invited into “a large, heavy building, a fortress that protects what we have collected,” as the narrator commented with ambiguous chattiness, referring to the building’s earlier life as a bank.1 NRK’s documentary Time, money and art showed glimpses of the building work preceding the museum opening. The concrete, down-to earth functions of the bank building, and the more ephemeral, high-cultural function of the contemporary art exhibition space were presented as if in opposition to each other. “Walls are painted, chandeliers removed, windows covered up. Renewal. The building is nevertheless the same. Will the building also be able to exhibit traces of our lives?” came the leading question from the voice-over.

To mark this new era for contemporary art in Norway, the director Jan Brockmann launched the new periodical Terskel (‘Threshold’), and the exhibition Terskel 1, mounted for the opening, manifested many aspects of the newly established institution. As a modern museum, its institutional self-assurance was important, and the history of the building and the square was given a prominent place in the magazine. The physical framework of the building itself gave rise to the ‘Threshold’ name, since the stairway to the museum, for historicizing reasons, failed to adhere to the latest ‘universal design’ principles of accessibility for all.

1907 In 1907, the Norwegian central bank Norges Bank opened at Bankplassen 4. This was the second of the Norges Bank buildings on Bankplassen. The first had been built as a branch when the bank had its headquarters in Trondheim, and was given the address Bankplassen 3. The branch was completed in 1828 and was designed by the particularly efficient architect Christian Heinrich Grosch. When Norges Bank acquired its headquarters in Christiania in 1897, Bankplassen 3 was too small, and a new, larger and more prestigious building was needed.2 In Terskel 1, the interior architect Kay Maria Staaland wrote about the competition to design the building, announced in 1900. It was already clear from the competition brief that the building also had to provide space for the public, which led to, among other things, the magnificent sky-lit hall, which was later to become the main space in the Museum of Contemporary Art.3 The commission for the design of a new flag-ship building for Norges Bank was an attractive one, and a total of 62 proposals were submitted. The winner of the competition was the architect Ingvar Olsen Hjorth, who later went on to design the east wing of the National Gallery.4 As a structure of national importance, the building was to be “Norwegian” and exhibit its national identity through the choice of materials, through craftsmanship and decoration. Rough-hewn greyishblue bricks of Larvik syenite were used on the facade, and the national aspect continues in the interior of the building (with more Norwegian stone such as rough-hewn labradorite, among others).5 The organic lines of the interior announce the arrival of the Art Nouveau style in Norway.

2 When the removals had been completed, the National Archives moved into Bankplassen 3 in 1914. Today the building houses the National Museum – Architecture, after an extensive reprojecting by Sverre Fehn.

3 Kay Maria Staaland, “Norges Bank – bygningshistorie”, in Terskel 1/1990, p. 211.

1 Tid, penger og kunst, produced by Stig Andersen and Bjørn Engvik, NRK 20.02.1990, accessible at https://tv.nrk.no/program/FSAM08000190.

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4 Oslo Byleksikon, Oslo: Kunnskapsforlaget, 2010, p. 206.

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Staaland, 213.

MARIANNE HEIER

To return to the documentary Time, money and art, which included several interviews with former bank employees, the viewers were given glimpses of the inner life of the bank, the social function of the interior skylit aula, the bad smell of bank notes from the cod fisheries, and images of the bank surrounded by stacks of wood during the war.

The building functioned as a bank for almost 80 years until Norges Bank once more needed larger premises and a new expression of its identity, this time occupying a whole neighbourhood on the east side of Bankplassen. In 1983, Norges Bank had proposed that the building should be used for cultural purposes, inasmuch as a report from the Norwegian Directorate for Public Construction and Property (now called Statsbygg) declared, rather startlingly, that the old office building was probably “unsuitable for office purposes.”6 On the other hand, according to the report, it offered very suitable premises for a museum, so the way was now paved for a new reshuffle.

1837

2019

The picture shows the demolition of the Christiania Theatre at Bankplassen 4 in 1899. At that time, the theatre had been operating since 1837, and had played a central role in the cultural aspects of nation-building. It was the place where Peer Gynt was premiered, and its directors had included both Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. Now it had to go, and a new building for Norges Bank was built in its place. The seating for 900 people, which had been upgraded from 800 in 1863, had become far too small for a modern European city.

In addition, it was necessary to give it a more prominent site where the new Christiania had taken shape, a national theatre along the main Karl Johan axis.

Bankplassen 4 stands vacant. Traces of the museum still remain in the rooms and corridors. Old light fittings lie in neat stacks waiting to be taken away; the walls show scars from the removal of the exhibition surfaces. On one wall the traces of a work by Jan Christensen are still legible. Newly reopened windows can once more shed daylight on the ceremonial premises. Wear and tear on the old control room is unable to conceal the imposing monumentality.

For 60 years, the theatre had been the city’s cultural living room, and along with Cafe Engebret, the regular haunt of stage artists, it made Bankplassen a vibrant space in the city. By the end of the 1800s the building no longer lived up to the expectations of the age, although the theatre had been an attraction when it first opened. “On 5th October 1837 the theatre on Bankpladsen was finished – a building the age considered to be of an impressive character,” one can read in the Festschrift for the new theatre in 1899.7 But this changed with the growth of the city:

In 1877, after a fire in the theatre building, it was decided to create a new theatre. Money was collected from donations, and the Studenterlunden park stood out as an ideal location. But the State put its foot down, this time taking the view that culture had no business being so close to the University.

Several sites were reviewed and investigated, but after ten years of arid argument the state gave in and Studenterlunden was chosen on as the final site.

The competition for a theatre design with 1,200 seats was announced in 1891, and Henrik Bull, who came second in the competition for Bankplassen 4, was awarded the commission.9 The building was completed in 1906, a few months before the opening of the new Norges Bank at Bankplassen 4.

“Gradually it was felt that the building was too small and too poor, its furnishings and inventory too far behind the times, and above all its location rather unfortunate.

The growth of the city towards the west and north pushed the theatre on Bankpladsen farther and farther away from the centre.

An urge was felt for a new theatre, centrally located, with up-to-date equipment, worthy of the capital with its population of 80,000.”8

6 The findings of the report are to be found in Jan Brockmann, “Til åpningen av museet”, in Terskel 1/1990, p. 8.

7 Nationaltheatret i Kristiania: Festskrift i anledning of Nationaltheaterets aabning 1ste september 1899, Kristiania: Det Norske Actieforlag 1899, p. 1.

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AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

Festskrift, p. 2.

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It is possible that the wind has changed direction slightly over the three years since our City of Dislocation project. The National Gallery is after all to be owned by the museum, as a kind of satellite along with the Museum of Architecture at Bankplassen 3. And the National Theatre is to move into the old Munch Museum, adding an extra stage.

The idea of branding districts with new symbolic buildings seems weaker, and the idea of re-using buildings has strengthened alongsidethe awareness that an existing building can also confer iconic status. One example is the evacuated US Embassy designed by the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, which was the object of a long, heated round of proposals in 2018. The winner was a private investor who wants to use the building to profile his firm. At the same time, hotel owner Petter Stordalen has got hold of Jernbanetorget and made use of two iconic buildings on each side of the square as hotels; one, Amerikalinjen, bases its whole concept on the building’s history, while the other one builds on an iconic building by Knut Knutsen.

Of the five buildings we studied in City of Dislocation, two still remain devoid of any new function. One is the old Deichman Library, which should be incorporated into the new Government District.10 The other is Bankplassen 4.

9 Bull in fact also won second place in this competition, but since his proposal was more realistic to implement, it was the one that was realized.

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10 Kristiania University College has recently considered buying the building: https://www.aftenposten. no/osloby/i/OnxOvA/Privat-hoyskole-vil-kjope-Deichman

MARIANNE HEIER

AND THEIR SPIRITS LIVE ON

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For osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, Ross created sculptures in three different places in the city: an antiquarian bookshop, a clock repair shop, and a street corner.

COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 2019

MICHAEL ROSS TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES)

Do you remember how magical a visit to a shop could be when you were a child? Things filled the shelves that you didn’t yet understand the use of. Staff you didn’t know, the unfamiliar language spoken about the objects for sale. Strange smells, strange sounds. And gradually, as we grew up, and the visits to the shop became more routine, we learned how to find what we were looking for quickly and efficiently and to refrain from buying things we didn’t need. Specialist shops became something we only visit when necessary. We end up walking the usual streets, at same times every day. What makes us go looking for the other stuff?

What makes us try to recover the magic of the city, of visiting unfamiliar places? Michael Ross’s project for osloBIENNALEN is called Tre Eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), and consists of three different works relating to magic and adventure, which he has sited around Oslo, at places you have probably not seen before. Ross’s project is about tempting us to take unfamiliar routes in a city we already know, to seek out intriguing shops we wouldn’t otherwise visit. To see something we have never seen before. To feel the magic.

LAUNCH

MAY, 2019 DESCRIPTION

SCULPTURES AT THREE LOCATIONS LOCATION

NORDLI ANTIQUARIAN BOOKSHOP, WATCHMAKER OSSUR SOLEIM AND MYNTGATA 2 STATUS

ENDED SEPTEMBER 2019 AT TWO LOCATIONS. THE WORK AT MYNTGATA 2 REMAINS ON VIEW

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

For nearly 30 years, MICHAEL ROSS (1954, USA), who lives and works in New York, has created smallscale sculptures employing unexpected combinations of everyday elements and materials. Within the space of a few inches or even less, bits, parts, scraps and fragments of forgotten things, his anti-heroic and uncompromised world resonates.

Ross has created several works in public spaces which subtly interact with civic space. In Venice, a small buoyant sculpture containing a triangle of Venetian glass floated down a canal; on the streets of Tokyo, micro-texts composed by the artist and engraved onto steel utility poles presented haiku of celestial activity. Ross’ enigmatic sculptures and public gestures transform ordinary places and things into a mysterious and poetic vision.

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TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES). THE MIDDLE AGES, INSTALLATION VIEW, NORLIS ANTIKVARIAT, UNIVERSITETSGATA 18

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Sindre Andersen THE FAIRY-TALE THAT WHISPERED ITSELF Sindre Andersen is a Norwegian translator and critic. In his essay on Michael Ross’ work Tre Eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), he draws on Astrid Lindgren’s classic adventure novel Mio, my Mio.

In Mio, min Mio, Astrid Lindgren’s classic fantasy novel (English version Mio, my Son), there is a well that whispers in the evening. When Mio and his friend Jum Jum visit the house of Jiri and his siblings on one of their rides through the Faraway Land, they go off to the well in the twilight so Mio can hear its whispering. After a period of total silence he hears something: “Deep, deep down there it began to whisper and murmur. It was a strange voice like no other. And it whispered tales – tales like no other tales, more beautiful than all other tales in the world.”

Those words, “it whispered tales,” are about the only memory I have from my childhood reading of Mio, min Mio. I remember that I imagined this voice as a continuous murmuring of the fairy-tale to beat all fairy-tales, wonderful and impossible to reproduce. This was the essence of the fairy-tale genre, the (lost) sense of the fairy-tale, welling up from its idealized, inextinguishable source.

The feeling of the fairy-tale may be lost, but the actual feeling that it is lost lives on. We bear it with us, in adult life, where it makes us listen to its whispering again and again, during working hours, in the city, in venerable old shops and on melancholy street corners, in broad daylight.

Michael Ross’s contribution to Oslobiennalen is a “city triptych” consisting of uniquely produced objects placed in waiting around Oslo: two large eggs in metal in the shop of the clockmaker Ossur Soleim on Tordenskioldsgate; two wall signs with the inscription “MILLINILLION” on the corner of Myntgata 2 (by Oslobiennalen’s headquarters); a golden, bent teaspoon hanging from the ceiling of the Norlis antiquarian bookshop on Universitetsgata.

The title of the work in its entirety is clear enough: Three Fairy Tales.

TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES)

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Michael Ross (b. 1954) is based in New York, and is known for his small, semi-absurd wall sculptures, pendant trifles and waste objects from useful reality. Among other things he has made a series of sculptures inspired by the American-Japanese author of tales, Lafcadio Hearn. With his contribution to osloBIENNALEN he is more figurative and at the same time more conceptual than he has been in the past.

The three sculptures are presented as “untold fairytales”; perhaps they should rather be described as untellable? By nature they are disconnected, non-narrative, oriented towards both the moment and eternity – morning-fresh ready-mades from a Faraway Land.

And they whisper to us in places where we would not expect them to. Or perhaps where we would expect them to do so in a different way? Shops and street corners are mythical places in the cityscape, even without such manifestations, but Ross’s objects evoke the true fascination and rebelliousness of the magical reality of the fairy-tale. Their low-key gentleness is not of the narrative variety, they coax our attention to the unexpected and our dormant imagination.

The Longest Day and the Longest Night is what he has called the two eggs in the clockmaker’s shop.

In fact they look just as much like two light bulbs, each on its own stand. Lamps without shades that shine with light and darkness in the way we know from everyday life: one egg is dark as night, the other the sky-blue of day. The title could have belonged to its own fairy-tale, and with its reference to the experience of time it has a metaphysical feel to it.

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Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), The Longest Day and the Longest Night, installation view, Urmaker Ossur Soleim, Tordenskioldsgate 7, 2019

In the world of fairy-tale, day and night are potentially eternal entities, just like good and evil.

Clock time is only appearance. When the fairy-tale hero is challenged to go to the end of the world and back “in ten minutes,” it is as if someone is intervening to adapt supernatural reality to the child who sits listening in awe, to adapt it to us.

We stand in the clockmaker’s shop and dream ourselves into a world where day is the enemy of night, and day is always on our side – and where we refuse to budge.

To the extent that in our time a clockmaker’s shop is a fairy-tale place, it is because clocks, so analogue-sounding and ornate, have become remote phenomena to us. And because the shop actually has them in such absurd profusion: clocks that are set differently, that tick and chime unsynchronized, and thus engage in a cacophonous whispering game. But over them all, the longest day and the longest night rule, in the form of a pair of eggs.

Eggs, which in themselves are about life, about unprotected, unhatched life. Ross’s eggs have been formed beyond time, they are themselves pure time with no beginning and no end – an eternity located amidst the temporal.

MICHAEL ROSS

In other words, the eggs and the notices point to familiar fairy-tale clichés. On the other hand, The Middle Ages – the spoon in the antiquarian bookshop – gives us a hint of a little fairy-tale of its own, hanging on a maroon ribbon from the ceiling, shiny golden and fine, like a christening gift or old silverware – and oddly bent.

Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), The Longest Day and the Longest Night, installation view, Urmaker Ossur Soleim, Tordenskioldsgate 7, 2019

In the work Tvilling Millinillion (Twin Millinillion), day and night have become gold and silver, on two coloured metal notices hanging next to each other on a street corner. A MILLINILLION is an inconceivably sky-high quantity, a ‘fantasillion,’ a million to the power of two or perhaps even more. The word may seem invented, but it is in fact a real designation for the number which consists of a one and 3,006 zeros – and which in its capacity as an even number also meets the criterion for symbolizing the infinite in mythological language. But infinities and high numbers are not necessarily the same: the logic of the fairy-tale is like the logic of dreams – it permits several contradictions at the same time. It is both stasis (zero) and eternity (infinity), and more often than not alternates between the two. A millinillion is in reality much more than a million – and more than the millennia, more than the “thousands and thousands of years” that form the framework for Mio’s destiny in Lindgren’s novel. With their placement in the middle of a city, the notices also make light of the urge to go as high as possible, both in talk and in reality – and in money, which is after all talk and reality in perfect harmony.

In Europe the correct name for the number is a “quingentilliard”; but that would not fit on the notices: “millinillion” is a word that resonates with childishness and rarity in one and the same breath. An immediately understandable new word, easy to remember, a dollar grin pasted on a venerable wall. The notices also suggest a street that crosses itself.

TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES)

Spoons are among the earliest memories I have in life. Teaspoons of porridge, tablespoons of juice and cod-liver oil, of sugar for strewing over pancakes, the plastic spoons of medicine the time I had pneumonia. A spoon is something comforting and childlike, something that enters your mouth again and again, a still indispensable object for human beings, in line with shoes and cars. They transport us through life, transport food into us.

They are both luxuries and utility objects: all the soft, mushy and shivering stuff we ingest with a spoon, jam and honey, whereas we take butter and pie with a knife. And the spoon is never a weapon. To bend a spoon is like bending time – it shouldn’t work. The shape of the spoon is given, it has to go straight into the mouth.

In fairy-tales, a single spoon means that someone is missing – for example the sister of Jiri who has been taken prisoner by the evil knight Kato (whom Mio later has to seek out and fight). In The Twelve Wild Ducks, a Norwegian folk tale, twelve spoons with no human beings attached are evidence that the princes have been turned into wild ducks so the princess can be born. At the same time spoons are also obvious class markers. The shiny teaspoon that hangs in the antiquarian bookshop – like the spoons of the bewitched princesses, and not least the spoon that tips Thumbikin (the Norwegian Tom Thumb) into the melted butter pat in his porridge during his own wedding dinner – is something other than the wooden utensils that the classic fairy-tale characters ‘Butterball’, ‘Askelad’, and the troll in the eating contest sit with.

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A spoon is a profane object that becomes sacred when we see it hanging there glittering. A street corner, as at Myntgata in the old ‘Quadrature,’ is ‘public space’ at its most poetic – where sheltered neighbourhoods are linked together, where something unseen reveals itself: a way out, a meeting place. And a craftsman’s shop is a residue of olden days, an area both private and public. Somebody’s business, where anyone can make their own discoveries. Ross’s three fairytales are not works that decorate, nor are they “experiences in space.” They do not point to the existential content of folklore or the fairy-tale genre, the self-realization that has mainly caught the attention of the folklorists. Rather, they are small prods, reminders. In all three works there is a doubling, a crease, a bend, a fold, a contrast.

Ross gives us glimpses, speaks of other worlds – but he does it in a clowning, minimalistic way.

Wandering around in Oslo in search of Ross’s small sculptures is pure meta-fairy-tale – just as Mio, min mio is: the lonely bookworm Bo Vilhelm Olsson is sent from his dull everyday life in Upplandsgatan in Stockholm (where the notices could have hung) to the Faraway Land.

But even after he has got there and is renamed Mio, he has a need for fairy-tale. It is still valid to keep dreaming. In our own grey and sad lives, there are traces of both the quotidian and the infinite experiences of the fairy-tales – and of course wells that whisper, spoons that glitter.

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Ross’s objects are like small magical symbols, quaint and glittering in public, like clues in a game or an episode from a surrealistic sketch show.

The small works cannot be experienced unless one steps into their own little world – listens, zooms in, while at the same time seeing them in context. It is the whispering – the appropriately combined wryness and snug originality of the works – that catches hold of us. Not very firmly, but it continues to hold us back if we stop listening, or again if we rush past too quickly.

And even if we wander around in a world which in itself seems to be magical, we shall continue to hear new whispering wells, melting clocks ticking, to tempt us further in. The day-and-night-coloured eggs of Michael Ross are unlikely to lead us further into the clockwork mechanism. But the spoon that hangs there and dangles crookedly – like a hunchbacked question mark risen from the dead – tempts us definitively on into the bookshop’s labyrinth of shelves.

MICHAEL ROSS

TRE EVENTYR (THREE FAIRY TALES). TVILLING MILLINILLION, INSTALLATION VIEW, MYNTGATA 2

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Øystein Wyller Odden’s project for osloBIENNALEN consisted of two works for the iconic Oslo City Hall: a sound piece that activated the building’s unused organ pipes, and a concert conceived for grand piano and orchestra. Both compositions were based on the 50 Hz frequency of alternating current in the Nordic electrical grid. The project received funding from the Arts Council Norway and was produced in collaboration with Ultima.

COMPLETED BY OCTOBER 2019

ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN POWER LINE HUM (COMPOSITION FOR THE ORGAN IN OSLO CITY HALL) POWER BALANCE (COMPOSITION FOR PIANO, ALTERNATING CURRENT AND ORCHESTRA)

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ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN (1983, Norway) was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and works with installations and objects, often in connection with sound and music. His work addresses the relationship between technology, architecture and people, and attempts to investigate and expose their underlying structures. Wyller Odden has previously held solo exhibitions at Fotogalleriet (2011), Nordnorsk kunstnersenter (2016), Telemark Kunstsenter (2018) and Kunstnerforbundet (2018), and has participated in group exhibitions at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Tegnerforbundet and Akershus Kunstsenter.

What sound does electric current make? In Øystein Wyller Odden’s project you were able to hear static organ notes that imitated the sound made by a fuse box in the City Hall. Electricity makes a sound; fifty times a second the current changes direction, which makes a low, humming bass sound with a frequency of 50 HZ. This low hum, with the resonances and harmonics it creates in the fuse box, has been transcribed by the artist for reproduction on the organ; this is the first time the City Hall’s organ pipes have been used. Two concerts were arranged in the Hall during the biennial, in which a string orchestra accompanied a concert grand piano tuned to vibrate at the frequency of the power grid in real time. The low hum of the current is not stable, it changes in response to the supply and demand of the energy market. The sound of the current is the sound of modern society and enters into a subtle dialogue with the social-realist art of previous eras on display in the City Hall.

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POWER LINE HUM / POWER BALANCE. COMPOSITIONS FOR OSLO CITY HALL, PREVIEW, OSLO CITY HALL BANQUET HALL, MAY 2019

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Arve Rød CITY HALL ELECTRONICA — THE LOW G OF THE POWER GRID Arve Rød is a Norwegian critic and writer. In this essay he describes Øystein Wyller Odden’s two works for Oslo City Hall, as an expression of the connection between the sacred and the prosaic that he finds in the City Hall itself.

Like most Oslo-dwellers, I pass the City Hall regularly. Now and then I go into the central hall – known all over the world as the backdrop to the annual award ceremony of the Nobel Peace Prize – to listen to the sound of everyday silence in such a large room, and to reflect on the details of Alf Rolfsen’s frescoes and Henrik Sørensen’s giant oil painting. The City Hall is one of Oslo’s most iconic architectural landmarks. The decorations both inside and outside are among the most ambitious in the country. The building itself towers like cliff walls of hand-beaten brick over the urban landscape, with its bays, reliefs and projections, topped by the two towers that stand like bombastic exclamation marks between the city and the fjord. And right at the top, the bell tower makes its daily mark on the centre of Oslo with the ponderous boom of its chimes.

In a vote among the readers of Aftenposten a few years ago, the City Hall managed to be chosen both as Oslo’s most beautiful and Oslo’s ugliest building. “No building divides the city more,” the newspaper stated. If nothing else, this is a sign that the building plays a role in the city space and in the everyday life of the citizens. For me, the City Hall is the closest we come to the feeling of a Gothic cathedral in Oslo. It is monumental and ostentatious, and at the same time a little sombre and unapproachable. It is truly a cathedral dedicated to profane forces. The City Hall is after all almost the opposite of a house of God; it is the citadel of the local administration and its pragmatic everyday negotiations. The decoration of the building points to a history of the sweat of the workers’ brows and the utopias of society-building, and to power and its exercise. Sørensen’s almost 550-squaremetre painting, which covers the bottom wall of the majestic City Hall, in fact bears the title Labour.

Administration. Celebration. – which according to the City Hall’s own information brochure “sums up the City Hall’s core functions.” The rest of the space is devoted to Rolfsen’s frescoes. Working Norway from the drifting nets to the forests of the east looms over the north wall. To the east is the Occupation Frieze, and on the west wall we see a variation on the figures in the Oslo city arms.

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Of all the decorations in City Hall, these are the best known and most discussed. Together, Rolfsen’s and Sørensen’s contributions form a narrative of a new Norway, of nation-building, the war years and modernization, of Social Democracy, “city and land, hand in hand”; farming and fisheries; industry and engineering.

Less well known is the part of the original interior that surrounds and partly frames Rolfsen’s fresco on the north wall. In the upper edges of the frieze, above each corner, there is an arrangement of organ pipes that looks like two crowns built into the architecture. To the left, a set of more conspicuous pipes extends almost ten metres towards the ceiling. The pipework looks like the kind of organ we normally see in large churches, and is something – once you notice it – that further reinforces the feeling of something ceremonial and sacral, as if the divine is nevertheless to be found just around the corner, and the 450 municipal employees relate to something other and more than political processes and meeting agendas.

But the pipes are not in use. In fact they never have been. The story behind them is as trivial as it is spectacular, and was the obvious feature of interest when the sound artist and musician Øystein Wyller Odden chose the Oslo City Hall as the arena for his two contributions to Oslobiennalen.

The pipe organ was designed as an integral part of the building in Arnstein Arneberg’s and Magnus Poulsson’s final drawings in 1930. In the journalist Carl Just’s two-volume work on the City Hall in Oslo, which was published for the ceremonial opening of the building, one can read that “up on the north wall runs a lattice, ornamentally designed with mural crowns and arrows in gold.

Behind the lattice the large organ is concealed.”

Such paradoxes and ruptures in rational planning often exert a special attraction to artists – just as the City Hall’s status as both the best and the worst thing in the city is fascinating in itself.

For Wyller Odden, the City Hall’s silent organ pipes became contradictory and thus potentially meaning-bearing artistic material. They could with great inevitability be incorporated into his ongoing project: to reproduce the sound of the power grid manifest in our built environment – or I should say not manifest, since our hearing is so accustomed to this sound that we normally do not notice it.

For the work Power Line Hum (Composition for the organ in Oslo City Hall), which will be played regularly in the course of the exhibition period, Wyller Odden picked out five of the organ pipes which for various reasons were damaged and then restored by experts in the Netherlands. These have been put back in their original place in the City Hall, and made playable by being connected to a simple wind system. The idea is then to let the pipes play together with the instrument which back in time replaced them – that is, the Hammond organ – in a musical transcription of the sound of the electrical power in the hall, and to let the composition build on the difference between the two sounds.

How the composition is performed in purely technical and physical terms is not as interesting as the fact that the result, a drone or so-called ‘bourdon’ – an unchanging note that can play below a melody, as on the bagpipes or the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle – is an expanse of sound that is just as suggestive and marked by mysticism as it is minimal and static in expression.

But no organ was ever placed behind the lattice – it was removed from the budget at some point after Just delivered his manuscript to the printer, and before the opening ceremony 69 years ago, in May 1950. Three million 1950 kroner turned out to be too onerous an expenditure, and the planned organ was replaced at the last moment by a much simpler Hammond organ at a fraction of the price. The pipes remained as empty decoration, as silent facade.

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More immediately evident as a musical performance is Wyller Odden’s other contribution, Power Balance (Composition for piano, alternating current and orchestra), with an ensemble as in a chamber concerto with piano. Here the strings will accompany a grand piano programmed by voltmeters which read off the grid frequency in real time, as well as a score that describes how the musicians are to react to changes in this frequency. The piece is arranged for strings by Jan Martin Smørdal. The piano, like the organ pipes, is tuned to resonate with the power grid’s relatively constant pulse of 50 Hertz which, translated into sound, lies close to a low G. The grand piano has then had two vibration elements screwed into the body of the instrument. These, like the voltmeters, are connected to the power sockets in the building, such that the current frequency is converted into vibrations that are propagated to the strings of the piano.

The concerto is performed twice in the course of the biennial, when we can experience the grand piano and the strings responding to the fluctuations in the same current frequency. What we hear by way of the dramatic soundscape in Wyller Odden’s work is, in other words, something as prosaic and down to earth as the power company Statnett’s transmission of electrical power to the country. It is part of the responsibility of the state enterprise to make sure that there is a balance at any time between consumption and production of this power; Statnett orders an increase or reduction in the power production depending on the ups and downs in consumption. This balance fluctuates around 50 Hz, with small variations just above and just below this frequency, depending on the relationship between consumption and production.

So by listening to Wyller Odden’s work we can at the same time hear Statnett’s work of keeping this relationship, and thus this note, stable.

Electrical power is the single factor that has most radically changed the world and our everyday life since it became possible to systematize it almost a century and a half ago. Hardly a single part of the modern infrastructure shown in Alf Rolfsen’s fresco above the north wall was not made possible or crucially formed using electricity. At the same time it is a mysterious – and for many people still incomprehensible – force. For a long time electricity was associated with supernatural magic, even after it was understood that a lightning strike was in no way a sign of God’s anger, but something that consists of the same force one could generate as early as the 1700s with the aid of a single Leyden jar. Electricity bears within it an ambivalence of an almost religious dimension. It can cause destruction and death but also create motion, light and life – just think of science’s own creation narrative: the story of the building blocks of primitive life, in the form of molecules that were bombarded with electric charges in the ‘primeval soup.’

Wyller Odden’s interpretation of the power grid is an ‘audification’ of electrical civilization, with sacral overtones. It is in fact no accident that several of his earlier, similar projects were implemented in churches. The ambivalence of the works thus reflects both electricity’s own nature and mythology, and the City Hall building’s contrast between artistic and architectural ambition on the one hand, and political and the administrative everyday life played out there on the other. For Wyller Odden, the ambivalence of the sound of power in this space is also interesting for more down-to-earth reasons. As he himself puts it in his description of the project, it is “the sound of the refrigerator, the fuse box and the fluorescent bulbs in the home. But also the sound of cascades in turbines, heavy industry and synchronic patterns in society.”

It is part of the story that Oslo is the country’s second-largest power municipality (and biggest grid company), through its ownership of power stations all over southern Norway. The soundscape in the City Hall can in this perspective also be understood as a ‘bourdon’ note in a more metaphorical sense, as an underlying hum of electricity in the wall decorations’ narrative of administration, labour and industry.

POWER BALANCE, CONCERT AS PART OF ULTIMA OSLO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL, OSLO CITY HALL, SEPTEMBER 2019

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Jurriaan Benschop A COMMON CAUSE? – A VISIT TO OSLO CITY HALL Jurriaan Benschop is a German art writer, curator and regular contributor to Artforum International, as well as other art publications.

In the following essay for osloBIENNALEN, he writes about a visit to Oslo City Hall, where Øystein Wyller Odden’s works for the biennial take place.

Even though I am an admirer of the work of Edvard Munch, I am not sure that I would choose to get married in a room that prominently displays his painting Life (1910). Relationships were not Munch’s forte, and the painting evokes isolation rather than communion. It is probably a question of how literally you regard a painted scene when it comes to deciding whether such a work offers the right prospect for a future together. The reason for this reflection is that couples are offered the opportunity to hold their wedding in the so-called Munch room at Oslo City Hall. It is among the smaller spaces in the huge building – the proportions are pleasant, the ceiling is of pine, and the room looks out over the fjord. As a room in which to view a painting, it is perfect. The work belongs to the artist’s “brighter, happier period,” according to the guide who is showing me the extensive city hall art collection. When I point out that the two men in the foreground do not look particularly happy, she states, as if it goes without saying, “Oh yes; they are Norwegian.”

Oslo City Hall, built between 1931 and 1950, gives foreign visitors like myself a number of clues about what it means to be Norwegian. The majority of the artists who in 1937 competed to contribute an artwork to the building seemed interested in depicting society as a harmonious whole, moving forward to a better future, in spite of diversity and social difference. Their work reflected on the country’s values and resources. Art was apparently considered a good means of building national awareness in a nation that was still young. Gunnar Sørensen was chosen to execute the main mural for the spacious central hall. It depicts, in stacked horizontal layers, scenes of administration, work, education, and leisure. As in Munch’s painting, it reflects the cycle of life, but in a different way. In Sørensen’s case, painting is basically storytelling through images, leading the viewer through a series of scenes depicting trolls, poets, kings, and other national characters.

Pretty much the same goes for the other artists involved in decorating the main galleries of city hall. Alf Rolfsen’s large mural faces Sørensen’s, and shows people engaged in rural life, fishing, boating, and exploring new territories, all coming together in the same epic story.

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If I took the murals in the main hall as an introduction to Norwegian art history, I would probably conclude that this is not a country of painters, just as visiting churches in Tuscany might lead you to the opposite conclusion. Sørensen’s style of painting might be inspired by Italian fresco painting, but it remains static. Rolfsen’s work reminds me of socialist realism, with its didactic approach and heroic, romanticized depictions of life – a touch of kitsch is not far off either. The most fascinating room, in terms of painting, is one that I discover in the East Gallery, where Per Krohg murals contrast city life with nature. Here you actually sense the artist’s imagination at work behind the figures, whereas many other murals mainly seem to serve the purpose of telling a story. Despite this flaw, I enjoyed spending several days at the city hall, which puzzled me in its paradoxicality. Maybe the confusion was caused by the way the art program was pursued into every corner of the building, leaving no detail untouched. The marble floors have ornamental motifs; the curtains and furniture are all chosen and executed with an eye for detail.

The combination of art, design, and architecture comprise an environment of high sensibility to form, balance, and colour. It creates a cosmos in itself, distinct from what is happening outside.

And this affects the soul; it reaches beyond the level of storytelling.

When considering the works of art here, it should be noted that they function as the backdrop to other activities; the city hall is not an art museum.

The works are here to accompany people doing things like getting married, attending the yearly Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, holding a banquet for foreign guests, or attending a city council meeting. It is an environment for governance and public affairs, the art offering counter-images to today’s concerns and perspectives.

The most modern room, in terms of painting, use of colour, and individualism, is the banquet hall.

In addition to a large mural by Willi Midelfart, it displays several royal portraits, including one of the current King Harald V. He appears “not too kingly, not too friendly,” as my guide remarks, “just as he rules.” It is painted by Håkon Gulvåg, who earns my sympathy because, among his brushes, he must have hidden a sharp knife, which gives his painting some psychological and aesthetic edge.

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Øystein Wyller Odden, Power Line Hum (Composition for the Organ in Oslo City Hall), preview, May 2019

Walking through all this regal splendour, I ask myself: What does this have to do with contemporary life in Norway? What I see does not immediately match the people I meet in Oslo. These personages do not look like edgy workers or tough country women. They do not present themselves in heroic poses. They are not very excited about labour and progress. In meetings outside, I find most people to be down-to-earth, critical, and ironic, when it comes to evaluating the current condition of the country, or for that matter, the arts. I wonder what artists today would produce if they were asked to decorate the building. They would probably bring more doubt and scepticism to the table. And they would hardly feel comfortable addressing national identity as a positive thing, since identitarian movements have hijacked the term. The country is no longer young.

I had the chance to speak with a contemporary artist who is working in the city hall as artist-inresidence, hidden from the public eye. Lotte Konow Lund is spending one year in a studio high up in one of the towers. She picks me up in the main hall and leads me through two sets of delayed-egress automatic doors (“after the 2011 Breivik attack, things have changed here”), to the elevator, up to the building’s work floors. First, she wants me to think about what is not depicted in the murals I have just seen below, which is another way of questioning the choices that were made during the selection of artists back in the 1930’s.

“What you cannot see, for instance, are the years that Norway was under Danish or Swedish rule.

There are no traces of that history in the panels downstairs. And also no work by female painters or modern abstract artists,” she says.

ØYSTEIN WYLLER ODDEN

Here she touches on something I had been wondering about. With so many meters of figurative, narrative painting, what is up with abstract art in Norway?

Is it something that does not fit the local mindset?

Or was it just excluded here because the modern movement did not prevail in the competition? Lund mentions the work of Charlotte Wankel, an abstract artist who worked in the same period, and she adds: “Until Norway found oil, we were a poor country by European standards. Between 1916 and 1950, travelling to Europe was for the privileged, educated sector of the population. There was a common resentment towards abstract painting and modern art.” Lund has her own form of abstraction in painting, preparing a presentation of paper works covering the four walls of her studio, and symbolizing the four seasons. Yet her strongest impulse seems to be to make conversation about what art could be nowadays, and to make the audience question what they see and what they do not see. Her conviction seems to be that art needs to reach out to the audience.

Oslo City Hall makes me think about another famous set of murals from the 1930s, in the American city of Detroit. At the Detroit Institute of the Arts, Diego Rivera made a series of murals, in which industrial development was portrayed in a similar symphonic style, where nothing can happen without a grand finale. It is a monument to industry – the source of Detroit’s prosperity – and also to the workers who made it happen. The murals are still a cultural highlight, but not because they reflect the situation today. The effects of globalization and the decline of the automobile industry have caused a massive exodus, leaving the city an industrial ruin. Rivera’s paintings have become historical in unwanted ways, representing long lost beliefs.

Today, artists might allude to a range of issues, such as female, gay, or refugee identities, or ecological concerns. But the principle is the same, and it can equally lead to politically correct storytelling, so that the critical question is whether the works are more than an illustration of a story. Against an instrumental approach to art, the work of Edvard Munch is a good antipole. His conception of art, driven by inner necessity, still has relevance and followers today. Actually, it is the friction between art addressing a common cause and art as an individual and immediate experience that makes a visit to city hall so interesting.

Munch showed some interest in creating works for the city hall, but by then he was getting older, and eventually abandoned the idea. With his completed Life cycle (finished in 1916) in the Oslo University Aula, he had already delivered an ensemble for a public building in Oslo. The large wall paintings there each show numbers of individuals in relation to nature, to life, the passing of time, the appreciation of colour, and the sensibilities of the soul. While the Oslo City Hall murals tell stories about the people at large, or the country as a whole, in Munch’s cycle the focus is on the individual, evoking an existential perspective. I would not assume that the selfquestioning characters in his paintings, searching for sovereignty, have disappeared from presentday Oslo.

In Oslo, it does not seem that dramatic. These murals still evoke motifs that are relevant to the country (like the importance of wood, water, or fish for the economy). Only the cheery impression evoked through the styles of painting may seem a little odd or out of place. Yet it would be wrong to pretend that we, nowadays, are beyond conceptions of art of the type seen at city hall. The conviction that artists should address political realities in order to be relevant is still a popular one.

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PUBLIC OUTREACH AND RESEARCH MIKAELA ASSOLENT THE BODY-DOUBLE

BENJAMIN BARDINET A MAP TO GET LOST: A DRIFT THROUGH CONCEPTS, FACTS AND RUMOURS

MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS IN PUBLIC: A LIVING PROPOSAL

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The Body-Double is a public outreach and audience research project designed by art educator Mikaela Assolent, and carried out in collaboration with Oslo-based interior architect and designer Fatimah N. Mahdi. The project investigates how the works in the biennial and their dissemination function in relation to audiences. So far, The Body-Double has responded to The Viewers by Carole Douillard and Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine

by Mette Edvardsen.

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MIKAELA ASSOLENT THE BODY-DOUBLE

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MIKAELA ASSOLENT (1985, France) is an art educator whose research centres on how feminist strategies can be used to question power structures in exhibition spaces and how inclusive learning environments can be developed with audiences around artworks depicting sexuality. She has worked at 49 Nord 6 Est - FRAC Lorraine, the Galerie des Galeries (Galeries Lafayette), Palais de Tokyo, and other art institutions in France. She holds a professional MA in curating (Paris IV-Sorbonne University), an MA in contemporary philosophy (Paris X University), and is currently part of the Feminism, Sexual Politics, and Visual Culture Centre for Doctoral Training at Loughborough University (UK).

When have you ever had a say in what happens in public space? Mikaela Assolent’s project during osloBIENNALEN will give you just that!

In her research project THE BODY-DOUBLE, a researcher walks around among the public and initiates conversations with individuals or small groups. This may take the form of open questions or discussions, dialogues around the works, or listening to complaints or praise. Often museums and biennials have guides who explain to us what we are looking at, and how to view art in the proper way. Instead, this researcher will listen to members of the public and learn from what she hears. The lessons learned from conversations with the public will be the outcome of the research project, which will be conveyed to artists participating in the biennial and its curators. In this way you will actually have a say in the wider appraisal and understanding of the biennial. Perhaps, thanks to your inputs, it will be quite different in the future.

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THE BODY-DOUBLE. JENNIFER LOPEZ AND HER BODY-DOUBLE, PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN

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Mikaela Assolent THE BODY-DOUBLE In the following essay, Mikaela Assolent writes about the background to The Body-Double by reflecting on the fate of the minority subject in the public sphere of the majority.

Two bodies made one. The subject of the photograph.

The point of contact between them lies at the exact centre of the image. The figure on the right has the leading role, her eyes are open, her right hand is stretched in front of her as if she were in movement, showing the way. The direction of her gaze gives the picture its dynamic, inscribing a diagonal descending from right to left. The other figure is her sidekick; he is outside her direct line of vision but nonetheless by her side. His eyes are closed or semi-closed, oblivious to what is happening. His hands are on his hips, not moving. Their similarity is gauged through the differences between them.

Why do I concentrate so much on the shapes of the zippers on their hoodies? One is oval, the other rectangular. It’s as if the zips provide the key to the whole secret of what makes them different.

This picture is about hair. The three braids are an identifying sign. A world in which people are deemed similar through their hairstyles, instead of other characteristics. The precious hair is delicately held by an almost invisible person behind the figure on the left. A very specific action: to hold a strand of someone else’s hair. The hair is so flamboyant that they seem to be the only ones with in the crowd who have hair. The man with a shaved head, at the front, mirrors the man at the back who has draped a towel over his head. A towel worn as if it was a wig. Beach drag. There is also a tiny puff of white hair in the lower right corner, reinforcing the hair narrative.

Hair colour. Blond highlights. Braids. The colour of one’s skin. The shadow of shaved but perceptible facial hair. The jawlines. The shape of a nose. Are there any markers of gender or race identity that cannot be changed in a beauty salon or through surgery? I keep calling the person on the left a “he”, even though, right away, I sense I might be wrong. Language seems more rigid than bodies.

My use of the pronoun “he” speaks more about my own projections than about any tangible reality.

Jennifer Lopez and her stunt double in 2012 on the film set of her music video Follow the Leader.

What does it mean when our cats bring small, wounded animals into the house? Most people interpret these deposits as offerings or gifts, although inaptly chosen, meant to please or propitiate us, the cats’ humans. But according to the anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, “Cats may be assuming the role of the educator when they bring prey indoors to their human owners […] A mother cat starts teaching her kittens from the moment they start following her […] Later she gives them hands-on practice by flipping victims in their direction, exactly as a cat does in play. Mother cats even bring [wounded] prey back to their nests or dens so that their homebound kittens can practice, especially if the prey is of manageable size. So perhaps cats who release living prey in our houses are trying to give us some practice, to hone our hunting skills”. […] the cat assumed (but how could we know?) that its own movements were templates for our mimicry.

Who is the public? Does it include my neighbours?

The doorman in my building? My students? The people who show up in gay bars and clubs? The owners of the bodega down the street from me?

Someone who calls me on the phone or sends me an e-mail? You? We encounter people in such disparate contexts that the idea of them all belonging to a single body, one which could be addressed in speech, seems to have something wishful about it. To address a public, we would not go around saying exactly the same thing to everyone. When we address the public, we do so in a venue of indefinite reception, hoping that each person will find something of her/himself in it.

She is well known. A public figure. I wonder if she is so famous that at least half of humanity would recognize her. Certainly not. I show the image to my flatmate who is from China. She does not recognize her; she does not know the name that I pronounce. I realize that the public sphere acknowledged in this text is a sphere that my flatmate is not a part of.

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Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification goes a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it goes on to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.

The toll is one that subjects who attempt to identify with and assimilate dominant ideologies pay every day of their lives. The price of the ticket is this: to find selfhood within the dominant public sphere, we need to deny the self. The contradictory subjectivity one is left with is not just the fragmentary subjectivity of some unspecified postmodern condition; it is instead the story of the minoritarian subject within the majoritarian public sphere. Fortunately, this story does not end at this difficult point, this juncture of painful contradiction. Sometimes misrecognition can be tactical. Identification itself can also be manipulated and worked in ways that promise narratives of self that surpass the limits prescribed by the dominant culture.

Workers employed in cultural mediation (very often self-taught artists) also embody the soft skills so highly acclaimed in post-Fordism: they see themselves, by virtue of their occupation, as socially competent, good team players and good networkers, as inventive in coping with limited resources, as curious and ready to learn new things. Analogous to the artist figure as a role model, cultural mediation is associated with the promise to free up the creative potential of each individual, motivated to no small degree by the interest of economies “demanding workforces that are creative flexible and adaptable”. […] Cultural mediators’ aim in one way is to share privileges, create a level playing field in connection to access to the educational resource that is culture. At the same time though, it is to change “the others,” to make them more similar to themselves: to convince them that the mediators’ ideal of the learning individual is the right one.

The “woman” produced in drag is not a woman, but instead a public disidentification with woman.

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Preliminary instructions to act as a body-double in the public space1 1.

You don’t have to choose right away whose body you want to be the double of. It might become clear to you later, when you will be already acting as a body-double.

2.

Act as your own body-double. For example, act as more manly, straighter, richer or whiter than you are.

3.

Act as a fictional character. It can be very subtle, even imperceptible. You can also be inspired by someone you know.

4.

Think about who might be controlling you. Here the image of the puppet and the puppeteer might be useful. If strong emotions appear, such as anger toward the fact that you are being manipulated, concentrate on an artwork.

Artworks have usually more subtle ways of telling you what to think, it might even be pleasurable to follow their lead.

5.

If you like grand scheme role-play, think about how the city of Oslo is trying to get something out of you. Or capitalism.

6.

Find someone to make them act as if they were your body-double. Again, using an artwork can be useful. Try to make them see the artwork the same way as you see it.

7.

Expand to anything you would like to become. Animals, plants, objects, materials‌ Be their doubles or make them be the doubles of you.

8.

Combine all the body-doubles that you created into one.

9.

Think about whose body you became a double of by following those instructions.

1 A postcard with this text will be distributed across the city in October 2019.

THE BODY-DOUBLE IN BIRKELUNDEN PARK, AUGUST 2019

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Benjamin Bardinet is worried that some of the magic of art in public space is lost when everyone can map the city in advance using GPS. As a response, Bardinet’s contribution to the biennial is a map for getting lost, a map with quotations, facts and rumours related to works exhibited in the biennial.

A Map to get Lost – 2, will be the second issue of the map, a juxtaposition of Bardinet’s original contribution, with the addition of new routes, detours and dead ends.

It will be available in Norwegian and English at Myntgata 2, as a free map that visitors can take away.

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With a Master’s degree in Visual Arts, BENJAMIN BARDINET (1977, France) abandoned his initial ambition to become a lecturer while working as an exhibition guide at CAPC musée d’art contemporain in Bordeaux in 2001. Two years later, Bardinet joined Palais de Tokyo where he led the department of education. Taking advantage of the Palais’ “laboratory” approach to different forms of intervention and collaboration with schools, universities and apprenticeships, he instigated reflections on what is at stake in the mediation of contemporary art. After working at Jeu de Paume in Paris between 2013 and 2017, he has since been based in Grenoble, where he teaches a Master’s programme in Urban Design at the Graphic Design School, and writes exhibition chronicles for the cultural weekly, Le Petit Bulletin.

Do you remember the world before GPS? Just a few years ago we still went around with paper maps in our hands looking for points of reference in the urban scene or landscape. The aim was to get the map and the terrain to make sense together, so we could manage to find our way forward. An amusing effect of this was that we often lost our way. By pure bad luck we ended up outside the tourist itineraries and stumbled into things we had never looked for to start with. Today the smartphone tells us where we are at any time, and restaurants, bars, shops and museums are automatically marked on the map. By clicking on the screen we can see whether the shop is recommended by others or not. Benjamin Bardinet’s project for the biennial is an assault on this. He is worried that important aspects of the magic of art in public space are lost when everyone has mapped the terrain in advance. Bardinet’s contribution to the biennial is therefore a map in which we can get lost, a map with quotations, facts and rumours related to the exhibited works, a map that opens up new paths, detours or dead ends.

Benjamin Bardinet's Map to get lost visualises the location of the artworks in osloBIENNALEN along with quotes, facts and rumours that Bardinet has found in his investigation of the biennial artworks and places. The map is available (in Norwegian and English) at Myntgata 2 as a map that you can take with you.

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Marius Wulfsberg UNFOLDING A MAP Marius Wulfsberg is a research librarian at the National Library and a literary critic in Dagbladet. He is currently completing a commented edition of Camilla Collett’s letters from the period 1852-63, which will be published this autumn. In his essay on Benjamin Bardinet’s A Map to Get Lost, he writes, among other things, about the place of walking in Western cultural history.

Lying beside other information material by the entrance to the Oslo Biennial offices, Benjamin Bardinet’s A map to get lost – 2 may look like an ordinary overview map. But its very title, if taken literally, suggests that this is a map of an unusual kind. It yokes together two things that create a paradox: a map and get lost.

Historically, maps have been an expression of our need to find our bearings in the terrain. With his work Geography, the Greek cartographer Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) is said to have been the first to develop a method for reproducing the round globe on a flat surface. This does not mean that the map always matches the terrain. Often it is rather the terrain that has to be adapted to the map. When the new Norwegian city of Christiania was built after the fire of 1624, it was done in accordance with a map that King Christian IV had already drawn up. But the need for the terrain to be formed in accordance with the map proved as relentless as the need for a map to reproduce the landscape accurately. If Christopher Hansteen has inscribed himself in Norwegian nineteenth-century history, it is because he laboriously worked out the coordinates of the capital. Today, when we enter an address in our mobile phone, we take it for granted that the blue line on the map will show us the route to our destination. It is this need to know exactly where we are that Bardinet’s map questions.

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Maps are also historical documents and artworks that tell us something about how the world has been understood at different times. Ptolemy’s mapping of the world stops at the Arctic Circle, because he did not believe there could be any people farther north. From Christian IV’s map it is evident that it was first and foremost Christiania’s military significance that interested him. That the citizens created a square that was not drawn on the map tells us something about their relationship with the King. We get some idea of how difficult it can be to get an overview of the terrain from the fact that Hansteen placed Christiania 139 meters too far to the south and 191 meters too far to the east. How much of the surroundings disappears when we move along the street with our gaze fixed on a GPS map? Maps do not give us accurate images of the terrain, but make suggestions as to how we can understand and orient ourselves in a landscape. With his map, Bardinet invites us to move around in the city as if it were alien to us.

This becomes even clearer when we unfold the map. A number of names, titles and quotes are strewn across the map sheet without being tied to the geography of the city. Instead, a flickering interaction appears between the highlighted sentences that make it look more like a text collage than a map. From left to right the city has been drawn with a fine line. The cartographic representation does not provide much information.

There is no image indicating the points of the compass, there are no streets or buildings, nor is the dividing line between sea and land marked.

Only the Akerselva river winds like a grey strip across the landscape. The map presents Oslo in the same way as earlier cartographers drew in an unknown area they called terra incognita.

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So Bardinet’s map makes us question how we should move through the city. The subtitle uses the phrase en vandring “a walking tour.” Like the need to make maps, moving on foot also has a long history: “The history of walking takes us farther back than the history of mankind, but the history of walking as a conscious cultural act [...] is only a few centuries old in Europe, and Rousseau stands at its beginning,” American Rebecca Solnit points out in the book Wanderlust. A History of Walking.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau lived at the same time as the British clockmaker John Harrison. While the Briton spent the eighteenth century developing a chronometer that made it possible to determine the position of ships in motion, Rousseau devoted himself to describing how the landscape, the body and consciousness appear to a walking human being. With his technology Harrison increased human control of nature. Rousseau described the feeling of freedom we can experience by moving on foot.

“Never have I been so much myself – if I may use that expression – as during journeys I have made alone and on foot. There is something about walking that stimulates and enlivens my thinking,” he says at one point in his Confessions. In his footsteps, a succession of wanderers, flâneurs, walkers, idlers and vagabonds have explored the finely-tuned and transitory interplay between walking and thinking, observing and reflecting, and between impressions and associations. One of these was Camilla Collett.

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In her novel The District Governor’s Daughters she describes with acerbic irony how impossible it was for men and women to wander around freely in Christiania in the 1830s. “Our capital possesses no places of amusement [...] where one [...] can enjoy refreshments for a trifle and be enlivened by music and by the sight of a motley, mobile mass of people.” Even up on the city ramparts the citizens wandered around in well-mannered rows while scanning the horizon for the “smoke from the expected steamer.” Later the opportunity to wander around the city became an issue in her feminism.

When she travelled to Berlin and Paris at the beginning of the 1860s, she discovered that women could stroll in the streets without being approached and pestered by passing men. In a powerful appeal to the women of Christiania she wrote about her experiences in a series of letters that were later printed in the magazine Sidste Blade: “Yes, we wanted to walk. We wanted to walk despite everything. We must walk. The women who always sit in their carriages are bored to death. The days are over when women were only luxury objects for men, half expensive toy, half goddess to be worshipped. They have themselves toppled us into the arena of action, where we must work, engage in commerce, strive and struggle – in a word, we must walk.”

In the book Litterære vaganter (Literary goliards), Tone Selboe shows that Collett, with her roaming, observing, and associative depictions challenged the male literary flâneurs of the 1800s. In her texts, it is no longer only the strolling male who is the image of urban modernity. Among the crowds of the city there are also women who claim what she calls pavement rights. Indeed, at one point it is as if she lays claim to the right of women to get lost in the city.

“And then you can let yourself be rocked by the waves of strollers – how far you do not yourself know; you do not promenade, you do not think you have feet; you are simply eyes, while on the right you have the luncheon procession of the rich and grand all the way out to the Bois de Boulogne.

And if you turn around – and remember it – it is a relief after the crowd, after being almost hypnotized by the glittering, motley, eternally shifting flow, to wander across the Place de la Concorde.”

Although Collett returns to familiar landmarks, it is as if the text describes an ecstatic experience of transformation and of losing oneself. As she is transformed into eyes that are almost hypnotized by the surroundings, she loses herself in the city.

But although she returns, the tempting experience of being lost has not lost its grip. It is the experience of getting lost that makes it a relief to return to the familiar.

The shimmering and transitory experience that Collett describes seems to me to be central to today’s fascination with walking. In the book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit frequently returns to her attempts to get lost in the landscape, and argues that this can lead to a mental state of liberating presence. By losing ourselves we can discover ourselves and our surroundings as something new, she maintains. In her essays about straying off course, too, there is a protest – this time against “Advertising, alarmist news, technology, incessant busyness, and the design of public and private space.”

There is a similar invitation and protest in Bardinet’s map. Instead of opening the mobile phone map that immediately locates the user at the centre of the terrain, it urges us to get lost in a city that extends from Bygdøy to Ekerbegåsen. But more than urging us to get lost physically, the map is also an invitation to lose ourselves mentally, in reflection and in the imagination. By allowing the various artworks and quotes to sharpen our senses and our reflection, it invites us to explore the city streets, buildings and public spaces as if they have not yet been mapped, as if they, quite literally, still form a terra incognita that it is our mission to discover.

A MAP TO GET LOST: A DRIFT THROUGH CONCEPTS, FACTS AND RUMOURS. THE MYNTGATA QUARTER, SUMMER 2019

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In October, Michelangelo Miccolis performs the monologue, WHO CARES: Notes on how to address an audience – A performance journal, 1992–2017, in various public spaces and spheres, as well as in unannounced places around the city. The text is also be printed as a separate booklet and distributed across the city. As part of his public outreach project for osloBIENNALEN, In Public: a living proposal, Miccolis is also working in relation to projects by other participants, such as Julien Bismuth’s ongoing work, Intet er stort intet er litet (Nothing is big nothing is small).

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MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS (1981, Mexico) is a visual arts performer and producer. Since 2017, he is the acting performance programmer of IMMATERIAL at Material Art Fair in Mexico City, as well as guestcurator for Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Current and upcoming projects include The Army of Love, in collaboration with Ingo Niermann and Dora García; OFFSHORE, in collaboration with Cally Spooner; It Takes All The Fucking Time, Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich; and AVALANCHE #5: À proximité, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva. Since 2005, he has worked internationally on projects by renowned artists and institutions including: Tino Sehgal, Dora García, Carlos Amorales, Cally Spooner, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Romeo Castellucci & Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Venice Biennale, Fondazione Trussardi, Tate Modern, Palais de Tokyo, Museo Reina Sofía, IUAV University and Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneva.

Who cares about this art now? osloBIENNALEN has invited Michelangelo Miccolis to infiltrate other works in the Biennial, to follow up and challenge how they are presented and how they are received by audiences. He will collaborate closely with the artists participating in the Biennial, starting with his own experiences as a performance artist during the last decade. For who actually cares about art?

What kind of feedback can artists expect from their audiences? Miccolis will begin by presenting an extended monologue, WHO CARES: Notes on how to address an audience. A performance journal, 1992 – 2017, as both performance and as printed text. Then he will draw on his long experience of encounters with the art public, both as part of the Biennial’s scheduled programme and at unannounced moments around the city. In the spring, Miccolis was one of the performers in Carole Douillard’s The Viewers. In October, he will take part in Julien Bismuth’s performance, while at the same time acting as a link between the public, artists and the Biennial team.

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Michelangelo Miccolis WHO CARES: NOTES ON HOW TO ADDRESS AN AUDIENCE — A PERFORMANCE JOURNAL, 1992-2017 The following text is Michelangelo Miccolis’ script for a monologue he will perform in various public spaces and spheres, as well as in unannounced places around the city, during osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION. The artist wishes to thank his collaborator Nicholas Kleist for his extensive help with forming the script.

Hi, it’s good to see you.

Are you all here? Anyone missing?

(If there is a clear sign PAUSE) Are you comfortable? Is this comfortable enough?

We could’ve probably arranged something better.

I wish we were in a comfortable cinema.

Or would you feel too comfortable?

I love going to the cinema. It is actually the first space I felt comfortable in as a viewer. It wasn’t until later that I discovered performance spaces, where I had to train myself to find comfort standing or seated on cold, concrete floors. Eventually viewing turned into performing; standing, running, lying or sitting on those same cold, concrete floors.

When I was 14, I went to the cinema by myself.

Cinema Teatro del Pavone in Perugia. Or Cinema Peacock. Either way, Cinema Pavone was opposite the pay phones. It was an old classical Italian theatre with an early afternoon show. I remember the place being empty and going up to one of the balconies. 5.000 lire and you’d get your own private booth.

The River Wild, starring Meryl Streep and the ginger kid from Jurassic Park. I wanted to be him. I don’t remember much about the movie, except the sexual tension between Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. What I do remember is a group of teenagers, around my age, who arrived late and sat in the stalls below me. During the interval, the lights went up, and they all looked up, spotting me, giggling and staring. The movie started again and I forgot all about them. Which brings me to now: Why are we here?

Why have you come?

Why are you reading this?

What is it that I should be able to show you, or tell you?

I keep thinking, we are looking for a reaction that can only be brought about by the proximity of a live body.

By an encounter.

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It was in Udine, in 2006

A year or so later,

The first time I focused on the liveness of a performing body it was with a child on stage. The piece was called Crescita XII: Avignon by Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio. The program note read: “Crescita, meaning growth, is a gemmation, a theatrical action that derives from the episode to which it refers, and develops an aspect, idea, or detail. 20 minutes for only 20 spectators.” I remember the feeling of intrusion; feeling I was too close to the stage, too close to the performer. As audience, we were let into a set inside the building. We all took our seats in the miniature theatre where a pre-teenage boy stood inside a perfectly shaped white cube, all by himself, holding a basketball.

The action was simple: the boy playing with his ball, keeping his back to the audience. There was no net, only a white void of iridescent light to disappear into.

I found myself submitting a proposal for an action in a performance festival, where I intended on welcoming the audience, while banging a volleyball against the wall. In my head, the audience would enter from an adjacent room, witnessing the action through its reflection in a window. Playing Semen Song for James Bidgood by Matmos in the background.

I remember obsessing about the two-dimensionality of the image created and its liveness, the breathing figure and the perfect white cube. I had arrived eager to feel a rush of adrenaline. The director of the piece, Romeo Castellucci, had recently been a professor of mine at my university in Venice, where I developed a crush on him – if there ever was a time where I had a groupie phase, I definitely tried to be his groupie.

The young boy, Sebastiano, took his mark effortlessly, begging each audience member’s gaze. It fascinates me, still, that Castellucci had his own young son perform the work. I keep wondering what it must have felt like to be performing at that age. Maybe I had the same thought about the ginger kid from Jurassic Park and The River Wild, ten years earlier.

After what felt like both a glimpse and a neverending prologue, the actor grabbed the ball, and stopped, looking straight at the wall ahead as the lights went off, a monstrous sound growing in space. As if I, the viewer, were simply there to fall into darkness. It was the perfect combination of elements for me at the time. Sebastiano standing there, proud, or perhaps bored – hell breaking loose around him. The lights slowly dimmed back on, revealing the boy standing outside the white cube, which now balanced on its bottom right edge.

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The promo material included a picture of myself in black and white for some reason drooling fake blood all over my bare chest. It’s a good thing I was never selected. Easily influenced by my mentor; confusing authorship with admiration.

Summer 2007 The international art crowd was once again getting ready for the European Grand Tour. Like every ten years, La Biennale in Venice, Documenta in Kassel and the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, were all opening back to back. I made my way to Germany alone, trying to deal with my first major break-up. Arriving first in Kassel, Documenta felt underwhelming, except for Trisha Brown’s dancers at Fridericianum. While in the exhibition room, I started observing the other visitors, entertaining myself by focusing on each person’s individual behaviour, noting their tenseness in an unfamiliar environment. I remember returning the next day feeling better acquainted with the situation, immediately disassociating myself from the rest of the audience. A couple of performers spotted me from the previous day, and a silent complicity formed between us. I was performing spectator, confident in my newly acquired knowledge about the matter. The following day I made it to Münster for the sculpture project, the public outdoor exhibition. It felt playful, consumable — almost like a treasure hunt.

There was a rumour of a piece called, The Beggar’s Opera, consisting of an actor disguised as a beggar roaming the streets of the city, performing in real-time, unannounced. It felt more like a chore, crossing off the works on my map, but I wanted to find the beggar, not knowing exactly what to expect.

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Initiated by Spanish artist Dora García, The Beggar’s Opera was the first performance commission to be included as part of the International sculpture exhibition since its opening in 1977. It was activated daily by three actors for three months. Yet I never found the beggar, the rumour was enough for it to exist.

In the fall of 2008 In the same week, I was invited to perform in two very different durational, off-stage works, meaning that the audience was now a presence to be dealt with in close proximity.

First, Romeo Castellucci premiered the final version of Paradiso in his hometown of Cesena, part of his trilogy, freely based on the Divine Comedy. Three large scale productions were to tour together, Inferno and Purgatorio for the stage, and Paradiso as an installation. I landed a spot in Paradiso.

Romeo created a geometrical adaptation of the original text. If, upon entering paradise, Dante is finally left to cross the gates of heaven alone, in this contemporary adaptation, the audience, like Dante, was invited to enter a monolithic structure, one by one. Once inside, they would find themselves inside an antechamber, another of Castellucci’s immaculate white cubes, lit by a neon box carefully placed by the threshold. Upon entering, the white cube was interrupted by a black circle, seemingly painted on the opposite wall, which as they approached, revealed itself as an actual hole leading them to a second, larger, pitch black room.

I was stuck, high up in the opposite wall, hanging like a salami. My head, arms and chest flailing out of a second smaller hole carved five meters from the floor; my vertical stage. I was to emerge like a human fountain, stuck between worlds, with my legs balanced on scaffolding built between the walls, water pouring down from a hose wrapped around the opening, gushing water from around my waist.

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Of course I fell for it all.

What did it mean to endure such a test for 100 euros per day?

The work ended up touring for a little over a year.

Ultimately I gained an invisible agency of sorts, Romeo wasn’t there watching after all. Like kids in a grotesque summer camp movie, my partner Dario and I would each take one-hour shifts, lubed up in our swimsuits, half squirming on a bench, half high above spectators, ready for action.

Over time, we developed new skills to contain the bruising, which after our first presentation, I was bragging about, showing off my loyalty to the company.

So there we were, like spiders with Stockholm Syndrome, constantly adjusting our sight to the darkness, water dripping all over us, proud, loyal, slightly mental, and cold, more often than not.

Our relationship with the space grew to be the opposite of the viewers’. We would observe them crawling blind, and like predators we’d wait a few minutes for their eyes to adjust to the darkness and realise where they were. Then, they’d notice the figure stuck on the wall, signalled by the water, moaning. It would take them some time to accept the live performer, flailing.

The spectators’ reactions would vary: someone kneeling, someone stripping nude and showering underneath, someone proudly looking up and locking gaze for minutes at a time. After a while, I stopped reporting these encounters to Romeo. The image was his, but I began to realise that the practice of it coming to life was not.

Later that week,

The first time I met Geoffrey1,

I went to Milan to work on an exhibition by German artist Tino Sehgal, a comprehensive survey including eight works from his repertoire was to be installed in Napoleon’s former residence, the lavish Villa Reale. A very clever move by a young curator on how to deal with what is considered by many as the ultimate performance practice, a term Tino fervently denies: i.e. “performance,” preferring the term constructed situations. These constructed situations were meant to be performed carried out by hired bodies during all opening hours of the eight-week long exhibition.

I underestimated that encounter. In 2011 – after moving back to Venice for the summer, fresh from two years of touring with Romeo, not at all bitter that I hadn’t gotten a call back for his latest production. My days in Paradiso officially over – I managed to find a job as a gallery assistant, or rather invigilator, in the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Before the opening of the biennial, I received a last-minute message from a friend, inviting me to take part in a group performance, presumably from the artist’s repertoire, at the Spanish Pavilion.

I had previously worked with Tino as a student, landing my first performer gig as an “interpreter” of the forever addictive jingle, This is so contemporary! at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

During the six-month run, I sustained myself by drinking Red Bull and chain smoking joints behind the German pavilion. At first, I had been spotted at a party by his producer, Cora, because of my very committed attitude on the dance floor; she’s now one of my dearest friends.

Then in 2008, in Milan, I had been invited to participate in the same work. With two other “interpreters,” disguised as museum guards, we’d circle the visitors, dancing joyfully around them, each time they would enter the room. The audience was again my prey, for four hour shifts at a time.

After the exhibition opened and the audience numbers died down, I got lost in the show. At times the Villa would fall silent and I was free to wander in an audience-less space, contemplating colleagues in viewerless action while on a break, or negotiating a new-found relationship with labor based on the presence or absence of an audience.

Then, Geoffrey He and I both standing on a white stage, slightly raised off the ground, reading: L’INADEGUATO, LO INADECUADO, THE INADEQUATE in bold graphic black lettering below our feet. The stage was installed in the centre of the Spanish Pavilion, as part of Dora García’s new extended performance project, occurring daily throughout the six months of the biennale. On press day, I snuck away from my post at the Canadian Pavilion. Still unclear whether I was to audition for something or simply join in, I ran down to the Spanish Pavilion to introduce myself.

I quickly met Dora as she was about to do an interview by the entrance. She excused herself, passing me onto Geoffrey. He must’ve been in his mid-50s, his curly grey hair unkempt, dressed in black from head to toe; later, I realized that black is the only colour he likes to wear. It was warm and terribly humid, and yet there’s Geoffrey wearing a long, black, linen jacket covering his thin elongated body all the way down to his black leather boots. Christopher Lloyd from Back to the Future meets Margiela.

Again, as with Paradiso, the audience remained the focus: The lack of it.

The waiting for it.

The sound of them approaching.

The feeling of an audience when you meet them.

The moment they turn to leave.

How to deal with that encounter.

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1 American actor Geoffrey Carey, known for his work in The State of Things (1982) and Holy Motors (2012), among others.

MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS

He hands me a script. The title reads The artist without works: A guided tour around nothing. I’m clearly hesitant, but he seems unconcerned. I tell him I don’t usually recite text, bringing up Romeo.

His face lightens up; he’s visibly impressed. He mentions something about the plasticity of words, which makes sense to me, as I remember Romeo talking about the unconcerned approach an actor must have in order to utter words. Speaking a text doesn’t necessarily call for interpretation.

Dora suddenly appeared from around the corner.

Silent. Standing still in front of me while everyone else kept roaming around. I finished with my insults.

She blushed.2

Luckily the text I was to perform was taken out of its original context and was included, with three other solo works, into a new performance by Dora entitled, Rehearsal/Retrospective. It seemed that I was given agency to experiment, performing my take on this text, under the guidance of this bizarre acting coach hired by the artist. All the while, negotiating my presence with a restless crowd of art professionals distracted by the opening frenzy, totally oblivious to the situation unfolding.

I found myself exposed to what I perceived as a careless audience, rehearsing for a rehearsal.

When I was 11,

The original text for the performance, The artist without works: A guided tour around nothing, ends with a quote taken from Peter Handke’s seminal essay, Offending the audience. I remember Geoffrey insisting that I should just feel the words, screaming them if necessary. Given the unconcerned attitude of everyone around, and the insistence of this adorable man in black, I forgot myself for a second, and a demon emerged. Resistance turned into a sudden rush, fuelled by frustration. I decided to scream, scanning the entitled crowd. An audience demanding legibility, who never seems to have the time.

"YOU WAX FIGURES! YOU IMPERSONATORS! YOU BAD HATS! YOU TROUPERS! YOU TEAR-JERKERS! YOU POTBOILERS! YOU FOUL MOUTHS! YOU SELL OUTS! YOU DEADBEATS! YOU PHONIES! YOU EDUCATED GAS BAGS! YOU CULTIVATED CLASSES! YOU BEFUDDLED ARISTOCRATS! YOU ROTTEN MIDDLE CLASS! YOU LOW BROWS! YOU PEOPLE OF YOUR TIME!”

You are still here. A couple of you (assess the situation realistically) seem to have left.

Who cares?

I went to Paris with my dad. We took a night train from Florence. He was going on a business trip for two days, I don’t remember how I managed to persuade him to take me along.

The main reason for the journey, besides my dad’s business trip, was Euro Disney, which had just opened the previous year.

I was obsessed with Disney as a child. How predictable.

I realise now what an excellent product of the 80s I must have been, middle class small town boy from a half-Mexican, half-Italian family, craving to brand his experience.

2

Did I blush? by Dora García

Blushing is a sign of self-consciousness, of recognition.

Like laughter, you cannot neither fake it nor control it.

You blush because of all of a sudden you recognise a truth that is exposed, revealed, you see everyone sees it too, and although you try to contain it, you are aware that it shows in your face. The more you try to hide it, the more you blush.

I remember this line of Lacan saying that embarrassment is the lightest form of anguish, or, in another quote: Hence the theory that there is anguish when an additional quantum of libido, Triebregung, appears in the imaginary field, and it appears as a strange object.

Did I blush? I saw something that was not previewed, something that escaped the good plan of the approved, the planned. I saw all my behavioural defenses going limp, becoming useless, and I blushed.

To see Geoffrey Carey and Michelangelo Miccolis, two of the best performers in the world, meet for the first time and perform on a stage with THE INADEQUATE written on it, on opening day of the Venice Biennale, was a strange object/moment. Perhaps I felt all the other performances to come. Perhaps I felt what mesmerizing an audience means. And I blushed.

IN PUBLIC: A LIVING PROPOSAL

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I had been to Disney World in Orlando, a few years earlier on a random family vacation sponsored by a very intimidating uncle, who had recently made a questionable fortune in Mexico. The only vivid memory I have of that trip is riding Space Mountain: a dark, indoor, space-themed roller coaster in Tomorrowland in Magic Kingdom.

My dad, sister and I queuing for over an hour, our anticipation building, the queue moving slowly across rooms gridded by stanchions organizing an overflow of visitors.

A safety video on repeat.

Finally my turn.

I freeze.

The morning I arrived in Paris I was ready to reclaim that experience: I was going to go back to Tomorrowland by myself. My dad said goodbye at Gare de Lyon, gave me some cash, a phone card for me to call him once I reached the park, and a tremendous amount of trust for the 11-year-old I was. Clumsy and a bit scared, I then took the metro, excitement overcoming fear. I made it to Marne-la-Vallée. I called the office where my dad was having his meeting and spoke to the receptionist briefly in French. Now I was in the park.

I first told this story to someone, or a version of it, while working on a new piece by Tino in London, in the summer of 2012. Among us participants, we would refer to this act of storytelling as giving a conceit. These Associations, a major commission

by Tate Modern, as part of a series of large-scale installations filling its gigantic hall. I was back in London and everything felt spectacular; except that I was only getting paid minimum wage. The project involved over 200 participants, how do you account for each person’s labor?

Do you care?

I had to be there. My anticipation of the work had been tremendous, I was there to perform at my very best. Here we were, conceiting away.

The Turbine Hall at Tate is almost equivalent to an indoor public square, where Tino placed over 50 participants per shift, making use of the wide esplanade during all opening hours. We would repeat a series of mostly movement-based sequences as a group, breaking away to tell personal stories to visitors, continuously on loop.

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At any given moment we could leave the group and return once we finished giving our conceit.

Each conceit had to focus on a sense of arrival, belonging, satisfaction, or dissatisfaction. We could let it morph into a conversation, if the situation allowed; however, under no circumstances were we to discuss the protocol of the work with the audience.

Oops.

If confronted, we were instructed to leave. I don’t know how many intimate details of my very personal life I must’ve recounted over the years: my grandmother’s death to a curator at Tate, a shit your pants story to two young teenagers on a first date, a story about a threesome gone wrong to an older gay couple, me leaving Venice for Mexico City to a young mother and her toddler.

Some of us spoke out about feeling objectified.

Others about being poorly compensated. Though we conceited willingly, the general vibe was one of camaraderie. We found mutual strength in sharing our stories. Like a flock of birds, we would swarm the hall running after one another: trained bodies, hired bodies, differently-abled bodies, effortlessly coming together.

Halfway through its three-month run, during a busier than usual afternoon, probably a weekend, I approached a middle-aged couple trying to sit discreetly near the wall at the end of the hall. We were in the middle of sequence B at the moment our slow walk would turn into a sprint, reaching the top of the slope at top speed then turning around and sprinting back down together – plunging the hall into a momentary chaos of bodies, I stopped abruptly and sat beside them. I had decided to test myself by approaching them, without knowing what I was going to say. Sweat dripping from my forehead, I decided to go for a disturbingly personal conceit. Sensing that I was stepping out of the work, I began to cry. I started feeling a strange complicity coming from the couple, a complicity amongst strangers. I suddenly forgot about the construction of this situation, realising the human factor for a moment:

MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS

Fleeting, Yes, Forced, Perhaps, But warm Reassuring And comforting nonetheless. (take a break from sentimentality) In 2014, I decided to move back to Mexico City.

The first few weeks I would walk non-stop, a harsh city for a walker but not impossible. I was drawn to the idea of mapping the city as a way of structuring my time. I would walk to think, and I would insist on walking.

Mexico City streets are passing in front of our eyes, but backwards.

Ana Valter

It took a while to find the avatar Adriana had mentioned a couple of other options, but we both loved the idea of the avatar stepping into the fair, unannounced. I had worked at her studio a couple of years prior, as soon as I moved into town. While going through her archives one day I remember being particularly interested in an earlier performance-turned-fashion-show of hers called, Painting strikes back (Spring/Summer Collection 2012), performed only once in Mexico City in 2011.

Adriana had hired a group of “living statues” from downtown Mexico City, inviting them to perform in the gallery. She set up a runway in the space for the group to model a line of newly-produced garments, which would later be mounted on canvas.

She presented this during the opening reception, where the participants ended the performance by coming together in the centre of the gallery, weaving into a human sculpture. A simple gesture, close to a happening, where the tension seemed to lie in the confrontation between the selected audience of gallery goers opposite this group of “anonymous and untraceable” performers of public space.

A couple of years later, I invited her to contribute a work for a pilot edition of a performance program I was launching in Mexico City, IMMATERIAL Vol. 013. I was thrilled to hear her plan to involve one of the participants of Painting strikes back. It seemed that one of the street-performers was impersonating a Na’vi character from the 2009 blockbuster movie, Avatar. We only knew her first name, Pamela. Adriana had lost her contact and tried to look for her downtown, with no luck.

Finally, we managed to find a picture of her in a Facebook group playing the Na’vi character. Within hours I was able to discover her last name and make contact. She agreed to participate. The idea was simple: Pamela was to arrive, unannounced in full costume, and go about the fair as a regular visitor.

Hired as a stand-in for the absent artist, her main instruction was to pay close attention to the works on display, while, of course, taking pictures to keep a personal account of her visit. We had settled for Saturday, the day with the highest attendance.

Before opening hours, I followed Adriana, guiding Pamela around the fair, timing the performance itinerary. At two I called Pamela, who was getting ready in a hotel room across the street, to confirm the time for her first round of appearances. I stepped out of the building, waiting. Fifteen minutes go by and no sign of her. I try calling Adriana – no reply. As the minutes go by, I start checking my phone obsessively and walking around in circles; Performing curator doesn’t seem to suit me.

It turns out that Adriana was messing with me.

She had instructed Pamela to arrive half an hour later than previously agreed.

I see myself in her for a moment. Dealing with the awkwardness of an audience in close proximity.

The curious glances, the disapproving ones. I finally pause and take a step back, now realising that she knows best. Avatar disappears from sight.

This spring I was a dentist,4 Last year an ordinary man.5 In Galveston Island I was a banana.6 Then I joined the Army of Love.7 And I’m still the artist without works.8

The real artists are in the streets: Part 2 by Adriana Lara at IMMATERIAL Vol. 1, Material Art Fair, Mexico, 2017

When viewing and performing off-stage the ultimate commitment is to the encounter.

How to witness it, to perform it, to produce it.

How to care for it?

Thank you for listening.

(Thank you for reading).

4 Nikima Jagudajev, The Dentist (May 3, 2019 19:30:00 GMT +1) (2019).

5 Cally Spooner, By all accounts this was a very ordinary man (2018).

3 Adriana Lara’s The real artists live in the streets: Part 2 was the first commission of IMMATERIAL, a dedicated performance program independently produced by Material Art Fair in Mexico City.

IN PUBLIC: A LIVING PROPOSAL

On cue, someone from the fair staff comes out, reminding me that the next performance in the program is about to begin. I make my way back inside, dropping my sunglasses and as I’m kneeling to pick them up, two blue legs suddenly run past me. I barely have the time to stand up when I spot the Na’vi already crossing the main hall heading straight to the exhibitor booths. Curator fooled.

Within minutes Pamela attracts the attention of almost everyone around her. She proceeds calmly through the booths, strangers now following her, instagramming every move, turning from spectators to stalkers. Obviously overwhelmed, Pamela starts refusing requests for pictures.

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6

Davide Savorani, Banana days are over (2013).

7

Ingo Niermann, Army of Love (2016).

8 Dora García, The artist without works: a guided tour around nothing (2009).

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MICHELANGELO MICCOLIS

CAPTIONS / COPYRIGHTS osloBIENNALEN TEAM COLOPHON ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS ABOUT

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OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

CAPTIONS

P. 5

osloBIENNALEN Director Ole G. Slyngstadli. Photography by Richard Aston. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 7

Curators Eva GonzálezSancho Bodero and Per Gunnar EegTverbakk. Photography by Richard Aston. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 11

osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 official opening weekend, May 2019. Photography

by Niklas Hart/Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 22-23 Adrián Balseca, An Observatory of Progress, artist renderings. Courtesy of Oslo City Archives ©. Original illustrations by: Arne Enger, Kristiania Stadsarkitektkontor. nr. 63207 Chr. Lange, Kristiania Stadsarkitektkontor, nr. 102701 O. Ruud, Kristiania Elektricitetsverk, nr. 228/1347, 364 Kristiania Byarkitektskontor, signert Bll./usignert, nr. 6349, 63401, 63402, 63406, 63802 Harald Aas, Oslo Byarkitektkontor, nr. 64201 PP. 24-25

Adrián Balseca, An Observatory of Progress, artist rendering. Courtesy of the artist. © 2019

PP. 28-29

Marcelo Cidade, a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around, 2019. Artist rendering, illustration by Hans Christian Skovholt. Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 31

Marcelo Cidade, a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around, 2019, artist rendering.

Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 33 Marcelo Cidade, a round around a round around a round around a round around a round around, 2019, artist rendering.

Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

PP. 36-37 Jonas Dahlberg, Notes on a Memorial, still. Courtesy of the artist. © 2018 PP. 46-47 Oliver Godow, Oslo 20142019. Courtesy of the artist, Hatje Cantz and © osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 50-51

Oliver Godow, Oslo 20142019. Courtesy of the artist, Hatje Cantz and © osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 54-55

series of photographs presented on postcards. Duplex offset on Mohawk paper. 24 motives, 5000 editions each.

Courtesy of the artist © 2019

P. 97 Julien Bismuth, Intet er stort, intet er litet (Nothing is big, nothing is small), performance documentation. Photography by Niklas Hart/Hartwork. © 2019 PP. 100-101

Carole Douillard, The Viewers, performance documentation, in front of Nobel Peace Centre/Oslo City Hall, 5 August 2019. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 103

PP. 62-63 Katja Høst, Y-blokka, series of photographs presented on postcards. Duplex offset on Mohawk paper. 24 motives, 5000 editions each. Courtesy of the artist © 2019 PP. 66-67 Javier Izquierdo, Crimes of the Future: A film about a film about a book about a city, still.

Photography by Tomás Astudillo.

Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Javier Izquierdo, Crimes of the Future: A film about a film about a book about a city, stills.

Photography by Tomás Astudillo.

Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 71

Carole Douillard, The Viewers, performance documentation, Grønland Torg, 1 June 2019. Photography by André Wulf/Dreiemoment. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 105 Carole Douillard, The Viewers, performance documentation, Oslo Central Station, 25 May 2019.

Photography by Inger Marie Grini. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 77 Alexander Rishaug, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E).

Photography by Arne B. Langleite.

Courtesy of the artist © 2019 P. 79

Alexander Rishaug, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E).

Photography by Arne B. Langleite.

Courtesy of the artist © 2019

PP. 82-83 Knut Åsdam, Oslo, stills.

Courtesy of the artist © 2019 PP. 92-93 Julien Bismuth, Intet er stort, intet er litet (Nothing is big, nothing is small), performance documentation. Photography by Marte Vold. Courtesy of the artist and © osloBIENNALEN 2019

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PP. 122-123 Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine - A library of living books, project space in Myntgata 2. Photography by Niklas Hart/ Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 125 Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine - A library of living books, project space in Myntgata 2.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © 2019 P. 127

Mette Edvardsen, Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine - A library of living books, project space in Myntgata 2.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © 2019

P. 111 Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Lumopolar. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 130-131 Jan Freuchen / Jonas Høgli Major / Sigurd Tenningen, Oslo Collected Works — OSV., installation detail. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 Featured artworks: Sivert Dinali, Snegl, 1969. after Pietro Tacca, “Il Porcellino” (Villsvinet fra Firenze) (copy of original from 1633), 1946, n.d.

Jørleif Uthaug, Blå fugl - hommage à Tor Hoff, n.d.

Knut Henrik Henriksen, Bird In Space (Erling Viksjø), 2014 Skule Waksvik, Rådyr med kalv, 1990 Courtesy of Oslo kommunes kunstsamling / © BONO 2019.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 113

P. 138

P. 108 Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Idunn Yr AlmanKaas and Qi Tan. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 109

PP. 74-75 Alexander Rishaug, Y (59° 54’ 54.76” N 10° 44’ 46.03” E).

Photography by Arne B. Langleite.

Courtesy of the artist © 2019

P. 119 Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Niklas Hart/ Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Asle Olsen and Idunn Yr Alman-Kaas. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Niklas Hart/ Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 116 Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 117 Ed D’Souza, Migrant Car, project documentation.

Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

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P. 150 Hlynur Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, The Mayor of Oslo, Stovner T station, Oslo. Installation detail.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 151 Hlynur Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, The Sámi People in Oslo, Etterstadgata 6, Oslo. Installation detail.

Photography by Martine Stenberg. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 154 Hlynur Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, Minority Groups in Oslo, The Vigeland Park, Oslo. Installation detail.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 155

Hlynur Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, This Is Oslo, Bjerke, Oslo. Installation detail. Photography by Martine Stenberg. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 158-159 Mônica Nador / Bruno Oliveira, Another Grammar for Oslo, workshop details. Photography by Asle Olsen, Mônica Nador / Bruno Oliveira. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 164-165 Mônica Nador / Bruno Oliveira, Another Grammar for Oslo, textile details. Photography by Mônica Nador / Bruno Oliveira. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 168-169 Rose

Hammer studio in Myntgata 2, details. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Jan Freuchen / Jonas Høgli Major / Sigurd Tenningen, Oslo Collected Works — OSV., booklets.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 171 Rose Hammer, National Episodes: Episode 1: Grini and the Futures of Norway, performance at Påfuglen, Hammersborggata, Oslo, 26 May 2019. Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 142-143 Hlynur

PP. 174-175

Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, Immigrants in Oslo, Sørenga Bridge, installation detail. Photography by Lumopolar. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 147 Hlynur Hallsson, Seven Works for Seven Locations, The King of Norway, Grorud T station, Oslo. Installation detail.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Rose Hammer, National Episodes: Episode 1: Grini and the Futures of Norway, performance at Påfuglen, Hammersborggata, Oslo, 26 May 2019. Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 178-179 Lisa Tan, Other Artists, installation detail. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

CAPTIONS

P. 182 Lisa Tan, Other Artists, installation detail. Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 208-209 Marianne Heier, And Their Spirits Live On, performance details. Photography by Lumopolar. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 183

PP. 212-213 Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), The Middle Ages, installation view, Norlis antikvariat, Universitetsgata 18.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Lisa Tan, Other Artists, installation detail. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 188-189 Gaylen Gerber, Support, n.n. Acrylic paint on barracks, German, Oslo, 1940-1945.

Dimensions vary with installation.

Photography by Paul Levack. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 191

Gaylen Gerber, Oil paint on mirror with gilt frame from the Kennedy Winter White House, Palm Beach, Florida, mid-20th century, installation view as part of Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019. Photography

by Paul Levack. © Gaylen Gerber/ osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 192-193 Gaylen

Gerber, Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019, installation view.

Photography by Paul Levack. © Gaylen Gerber/osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 194

Gaylen Gerber, Gaylen Gerber, Edvard Munch Studio, Ekely, Oslo, 2019, installation view.

Photography by Paul Levack. © Gaylen Gerber/osloBIENNALEN 2019

P. 195

Gaylen Gerber, Support, n.n. Acrylic paint on barracks, German, Oslo, 1940-1945.

Dimensions vary with installation.

Photography by Niklas Hart/ Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 198 Marianne Heier, And Their Spirits Live On, performance detail.

Photography by Stefano Campo Antico. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 199

Marianne Heier, And Their Spirits Live On, performance detail.

Photography by Kristine Jakobsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 202 Marianne Heier, And Their Spirits Live On, performance detail.

Photography by Kristine Jakobsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

P. 215 Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), The Longest Day and the Longest Night, installation view, Urmaker Ossur Soleim, Tordenskioldsgate 7.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 P. 216

Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), The Longest Day and the Longest Night, installation view, Urmaker Ossur Soleim, Tordenskioldsgate 7.

Photography by Lumopolar. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 PP. 218-219 Michael Ross, Tre eventyr (Three Fairy Tales), Tvilling Millinillion, installation view, Myntgata 2. Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

PP. 236-237 Photographer unknown, Jennifer Lopez and her body-double P. 241 The Body-Double, Birkelunden Park, August 2019.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

osloBIENNALEN TEAM

Curators Eva González-Sancho Bodero Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk Curatorial Assistant Håkon Lillegraven

PP. 244-245 Benjamin

Bardinet, A Map To Get Lost: A drift through concepts, facts and rumors.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Researcher Martin Berner Mathiesen Head of Production Anna Katharina Haukeland

P. 249

Benjamin Bardinet, A Map To Get Lost: A drift through concepts, facts and rumors.

Photography by Asle Olsen. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Producers Hans Christian Skovholt Asle Olsen Editorial Advisors Ketil Nergaard William James Packer

PP. 252-253 Michelangelo

Miccolis in Backstage Paradiso by Romeo Castelucci, Avignon, 2008. Photo by Julia Bauer. Courtesy of the artist

Head of Communications Hilde Herming

P. 261 Adriana Lara, The real artists are in the streets: Part 2 (2017). Performed by Pamela Aguila.

Performance view at IMMATERIAL Vol. 1, Material Art Fair, Mexico City, Mexico, 11 February 2017.

Photography by Barbara Esparza.

Courtesy of the artist

Public Outreach Coordinator Benedikte Rønsen Kristine Fresvig Event Manager Randi Øglænd House Manager Erikka Fyrand

PP. 222-223 Øystein

Wyller Odden, Compositions for Oslo City Hall, preview, Oslo City Hall Banquet Hall, 24 May 2019. Photography by Niklas Hart/Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Project Coordinator Itzel Esquivel Project Assistant Per Christian Høydalsvik Tale Aasheim Erik Love Aronsson

P. 227 Øystein Wyller Odden, Power Balance (Composition for Piano, Alternating Current and Orchestra), concert in collaboration with Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Oslo City Hall, 21 September 2019. Photography by Kyrre Lien. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Intern Astrid Drejer

Associated Consultants and Advisors

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Øystein Wyller Odden, Power Line Hum (Composition for the Organ in Oslo City Hall), preview, Oslo City Hall, 24 May 2019. Photography by Niklas Hart/ Hartwork. © osloBIENNALEN 2019 Øystein Wyller Odden, Power Line Hum (Composition for the Organ in Oslo City Hall), Oslo City Hall. Photography by Niklas Lello. © osloBIENNALEN 2019

Executive Director Ole G. Slyngstadli

Editor-in-Chief of Notebook series Ronald Van de Sompel Co-Editor Notebook series Kjetil Jakobsen Advisor Institutional Relations Shwetal A. Patel

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Unless otherwise stated the copyright of images belong to osloBIENNALEN and/or the artist.

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Research and Symposium Associate Juan Canela Claver

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CAPTIONS / oB TEAM

COLOPHON

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Executive Director Ole G. Slyngstadli Curators Eva González-Sancho Bodero Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk Technical Editor Martin Berner Mathiesen Image Editors Håkon Lillegraven Asle Olsen

Thanks to all the participants in osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024, as well as all those who have helped and supported us all along the way. Special thanks to all members of the osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 team, to all our colleagues at the Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo, and to all partners collaborating on this edition.

Ed D’Souza’s Migrant Car collaborators: The project Migrant Car was a co-production between Ed D’Souza, Eddie King’s Furniture and Upholstery workshop in Oslo, and students from Oslo Metropolitan University and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Editorial Advisors Ketil Nergaard William James Packer

The following students and collaborators were involved in the project: Maiken Astrup Helland, Camilla Dahl, Tiril Flom, Andrea Galiazzo, Milagros Gola Singh, Ingrid Granrud Veiersted, Darina Gryn, Julie Henning, Marielle Kalldal, Ronny Karlsen, Eddie King, Åshild Kristensen Foss, Geir Listhaug, Alessandro Marchi, Carina Marwell Hansen, Kristian Rosskopf, Karoline Sjølie Aas, Taradol Sutjaritvorakul, Qi Tan, Victoria K. Yankova, Idunn Yr Alman-Kaas, Amanda Aas Andersen.

Head of Communications Hilde Herming Contributing Writer Bjørn Hatterud Translators James Manley Sindre Andersen Sol Kjøk

In addition we would like to thank the producers and editors of the video documentation shown in the window of Eddie King’s Upholstery shop, Åshild Kristensen Foss, Ingrid Granrud Skaaret and Carina Marwell Hansen.

Designer Alex Gifreu Proofreader William James Packer Print 07 Media ISBN 978-82-690204-3-4 Print run 2000 copies First edition, October 2019

www.oslobiennalen.no

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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COLOPHON / ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS

ABOUT

Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milano (Italy) Black Box Theater (Norway) Deichman Library, Oslo (Norway) Ekebergparken, Oslo (Norway) Interkulturelt Museum, Oslo (Norway)

Curated by Eva González-Sancho Bodero and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk, osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 is a five-year programme of art in public space and the public sphere that will evolve and grow, adding and announcing new projects and participants as the biennial moves forward in time.

Sixteen projects were launched at the opening in May by Mikaela Assolent, Benjamin Bardinet, Julien Bismuth, Carole Douillard, Ed D’Souza, Mette Edvardsen, Jan Freuchen / Jonas Høgli Major / Sigurd Tenningen, Gaylen Gerber, Hlynur Hallsson, Rose Hammer, Marianne Heier, Michelangelo Miccolis, Mônica Nador / Bruno Oliveira, Michael Ross, Lisa Tan and Øystein Wyller Odden.

Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (Norway) Kunsthall 3,14 (Norway) Faculty of Landscape and Society (LANDSAM), Norwegian University of Life Sciences, NMBU (Norway) Department of Art, Technology and Drama, Faculty of Technology, Art and Design (TKD) at OsloMet, Oslo (Norway)

In October 2019, a second set of projects is launching featuring works by Adrián Balseca (Ecuador), Marcelo Cidade (Brazil), Jonas Dahlberg (Sweden), Dora García (Spain), Oliver Godow (Germany), Alexander Rishaug (Norway), Javier Izquierdo (Ecuador), Katja Høst (Norway) and Knut Åsdam (Norway).

Oslo kulturskole, Oslo (Norway) Magasin des horizons, Grenoble (France) Matter of Art Biennial, Praha (Czech Republic) Nordic Black Theatre, Oslo (Norway) Oslo Open, Oslo (Norway)

In addition to the production and display of projects and an experimental public outreach programme, osloBIENNALEN FIRST EDITION 2019-2024 offers an integrated programme consisting of workshops, symposia, performances, concerts and more.

Karmaklubb* (Norway) Kungliga Konsthögskolan, Stockholm (Sweden) Publics, Helsinki (Finland) Pikene på Broen, Kirkenes (Norway)

osloBIENNALEN is initiated and financed by the City of Oslo, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Norway. The biennial is the outcome of OSLO PILOT, a two-year experimental and research-based project.

Sámiid Searvi / Oslo sameforening (OSS) Sporveien Oslo AS (Norway) Stiftelsen Edvard Munchs Atelier (Norway) Ultima, Oslo (Norway) Winchester School of Art, Winchester (UK)

OCTOBER 2019: NEW / ONGOING / COMPLETED

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INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERS / ABOUT

The Biennial – like the city – never closes!

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