There is no audience; there are bodies and situations. We are embodied experience and all sensory input triggers memories, thoughts, emotions, relations, actions, language. This is the instrument we play – the body as situation – out of key, out of tune, by ear, or skillfully as the result of hard training.

In my work I use fictionalized situations and set-ups together with sound. Voice and time are vital ingredients, as is the situation at hand and what you as visitor bring into it. In my research I develop and explore situations where the visitors are invited to engage in an experience of being situated and responsive, where exformation is put into play and normativity is questioned. The bodily sensations, the context, physical space, and language are of equal importance. To me they all coincide in what I, inspired by Walter J. Ong, have come to call an orality-literate understanding of the human world.

We are deeply embedded in literacy and in a visual-textual mode of thinking; our consciousness is framed by it. The memory technologies we use discipline our minds and our mental processes. To explain what I mean, please, join me in a thought experiment for a moment. Imagine that all of us live in a primary oral culture: we do not use or even know of the technology of writing. There are no archives, libraries, novels, scientific papers, or newspapers. We constitute a community of tellers and listeners, and the most trusted way to both pass on and to store knowledge would be in the format of performances. Our perception of the world is oral-aural, where language is sound, rhythm, time and situation. Knowledge is not understood as a thing erupting from a solitary mind, but as situated in bodies related to other bodies in a specific context; it thus resides in living flesh, in a storytelling tradition, and in the environment. Viewed from this perspective, rather than being ephemeral performances are concrete, knowledge activating, and reality producing events. The performers are the collective memory of society, and with every re-enactment of a performance, it changes. There is no such thing as the original story, or original form; nothing is true, everything is alive. The world is relation.
Being literate though, does not mean that we have left the oral world behind, but that the oral-aural perception tends to be considered subordinate and inferior. It is regarded to be messy, unreliable, subjective and immersive. There is no outside from where it can be viewed. Let me stress though, that literacy and orality should not be understood as individual abilities, but as social phenomena where different modes of perceptions are encouraged or supressed. In my view, the division and hierarchy between these different sensibilities and ways of being in the world have created a gap that we constantly try to bridge: between body and mind, subjectivity and objectivity, practical and analytical, fictional and factual, etc. What I thus call an orality-literate understanding represents for me an occillation between these generally divided fields. As I see it, art operates in this gap – with the seen, the unseen and the in-betweens. Even though I am a visual artist, my conviction is that when it comes to art, what you see is never what you get.


The research project will consist of a series of performance works.
Recent and upcoming:
"Limit-cruisers (#1 Sphere)", performance at Inter Arts Center, produced in cooperation with Teatr Weimar, Malmö, Sweden, Sep 18-20, 2012, and Mar 24 and 26, 2013.
”Limit-cruisers (#2 Crowd)”, a praxis session, PSi19: Now Then: Performance and Temporality, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Jun 29, 2013
”What you see is not what you get – Performance as a mode of thinking”, paper presentation, PSi19: Now Then: Performance and Temporality, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, Jun 28, 2013
"Limit-cruisers (#1 Sphere)", Weld, Stockholm, Sweden, Oct, 2013.


<< Back to projects