< APPENDIKS 5 | APPENDIKS 7 >
On Saturday the 28th of February 2004 we presented APPENDIKS 6 and the reception of Lars Mathisen's publication On/Off The Beaten Track out on Pork Salad Press:
APPENDIKS 6 was a presentation of different publications and documents all concerned with issues of land and mapping. The document is often used as a reference, but we were interested in redefining its significance.
The document can be a tool for reflective orientation, critical thinking and the construction of narrative structures where different information is collected and resampled. In this presentation the document was linked to the investigation and conception of land. Mappings of land have a history connected to colonization. We were interested in some of the stories that uncover different views about the land from a multilayered perspective.
On/Off The Beaten Track by Lars Mathisen:
The publication comes with a CD soundtrack from the installation "On/Off The Beaten Track". When you open the book, you enter a world of close-ups from the scene of a crime. You are not sure what you see: a landscape of some sort, the reminiscences of a once familiar location. An uncanny place with leftovers: a burned down car, a closed off boathouse, a house with two walls. The setting is a scale model flooded in light from a video projection. What you see is rather an illusion of a place and a landscape of multilayered information.
Collected publications by The Center for Land Use Interpretation (website: www.clui.org):
CLUI: Publishes guidebooks, catalogues and books addressing land use issues. The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools. The Center conducts guided tours for public and private groups and produces public exhibits on land use themes and issues for galleries and museums, plus for exhibition in CLUI spaces in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Arctic Melancholy by Thomas Wolsing:
The publication Arctic Melancholy is made in connection with the exhibition of the same name. The book is based on Wolsing's family photos. His father took the photos when he worked in Greenland in the 1950s and at the time when Wolsing's family lived there in the 1970s. Years later Thomas Wolsing revisited the place where he lived and documented the present state of it. From the collected material he creates structures with past and present elements. His investigation can be understood as reconstruction of a past and a present, and as a "topographic atlas of memory". On one structure he has written, "The past is like an empty house in a landscape you can not enter."
Neighborhood Poster (master) by Dave Hullfish Bailey:
The collage is a kind of "tool" - what you would use in a disaster situation to make the kind of cheap, photocopied posters you see taped to telephone poles, tree trunks, street signs, etc. The posters themselves advertise the presence of the temporary shelter and community gathering point Bailey has proposed for the Schindler House in Los Angeles. They also make short-hand references to Schindler's thinking, and to more recent social and natural disasters in L.A., which together form the initial concept for Bailey's notion of an ephemeral "post-traumatic utopia". Depending which way the poster is hung, the arrow points to a different direction, so they could be used to direct people to the Schindler House from anywhere in the surrounding neighborhood.
Udflugter by Åse Eg Jørgensen:
This publication consists of seven exceptionally long excursions, from 82 - 100 cm, on three spectacular sites: Kullen, Stevns Klint and Iceland. The excursion is often understood as a stay in nature with the sky above. That is also the way you are invited as a reader into Jørgensen's book with seven photomontages, which can be unfolded. What is important here is not a romantic empty scenery, but to address the function of the excursion as a social structure for orientation and how to perceive nature. How the landscape at the same time is a goal and a frame for socialising, where the camera and visual documents can be instruments in the construction of collective memory and the perception of land.
224 Stykker Himmel by Lasse Krog Møller:
The atlas is a tool for orientation and a visual mapping of land and sea. Møller's small new publication contains a similar desire to grasp the whole world and transform it into a book object. But he does the mapping of the world in an idiosyncratic way where he cuts out skies from postcards and compiles them in a book. Through a longer period of time, he has been collecting postcards from different places in the world. They are now organized in Møller's private archive. From his archive he has made a selection for this topographical book, which points out how the same sky is constantly being reproduced at different sites through postcards as cultural documents.
Grass cake and tea was served + a soft one!
The presentation was on display from the 28th of February to the 28th of March 2004.
