Sinziana Ravini’s catalog essay on Another Way

Another Way – The Nomadic Artist

In the novel In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust writes that to travel is not about searching for new landscapes, but about searching for new perspectives. This is an extraordinary illustration of the many dimensions of a journey. To travel does not only permit us to cross geographic distances or to overcome external obstacles. Traveling also involves internal excursions. These journeys can neither be planned nor controlled, but conditions can be formed

In her work, the artist Ann-Sofi Sidén has always investigated the intra-human sphere, from a cultural, aesthetic as well as gender theoretical perspective. Over the last years, man’s mobility has also become an important aspect of her work. In 2002 she rode 250 miles on horseback through Texas. A trip that normally takes three hours by car now lasted for 25 days. During the slow journey, Sidén discovered new sides of both herself and of the American surroundings, especially the macho culture which views horse riding as a predominantly male habit. The romantic wildlife ride through old rodeo trails, multi-lane highways, sleepy suburbs as well as rice- and cotton fields developed into a hetero chronological journey, blending different temporalities. The trip resulted in the video 3 MPH (From Horse to Rocket) (2002), a floating panorama that intersects various time fragments: the human, the horse, the departure from San Antonio and the final destination Lyndon B Johnson’s Space Centre.

In the autumn of 2008, Sidén invited her students and colleagues at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, to participate in a joint journey to Wanås. Each participant chose how they would get there, but had to take into account the organizational, conceptual and ethical principle to travel without the use of artificial fuels. The aim of Another Way was to investigate a traditional ritual of freedom – the slow journey – in a modern context, and then find a way to process this experience.

On September 6, 2009, 16 students and two teachers departed from Stockholm. Some chose to travel in pairs, others alone. Some chose to cycle, ride or sail, while others walked. By taking imaginary roads, some students chose to question the conceptual framework of the project. After holding a collective press conference on the island of Skeppsholmen in Stockholm they started the 370 mile journey. Their roads were quickly divided, but communication with each other and the world around them was possible through a mutual blog (enannanvag.blogspot.com) where they published sound recordings, films, photographs, drawings and texts.

Artists have always made art of their journeys; from cave paintings, which can be compared to documentation of shorter excursions in nature, to today’s biennial artists. In the Romantic Era the artist became a wanderer seeking the savage nature. The encounter with nature became an encounter with the divine forces where the artist could be part of a dialogue with the sublime and unreachable nature. But already Goethe and Schiller started to doubt whether it was really God, or themselves who they encountered in their experiences with nature. In the last phase of Romanticism, the artist began to seek culturally distant places. The local excursion in nature became a global cultural venture.

Orientalism turned into the romantic artist’s preeminent expression of escaping civilization. This search for novelty culminated in primitivism by the peak of modernism, with the paintings of paradise by Gauguin and the African masks of Picasso. Victor Segalen writes in Essay on Exotism – An Aesthetics of Diversity (1908) about Exotism as a way of aestheticizing difference, and describes the artist as an “exot” who constantly searches outside of his own geographic and mental boarders in pursue of “a wider horizon”. In 2009, the father of relational aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud, published Altermodern that elaborates the theories of Segalen. Bourriaud writes about the iconography of the journey and of the mobility in contemporary art.

He discusses the multi-culturalism and the hybridization and the aesthetic forms they have created; a new global modernity advocating the present, the ephemeral, experimentation, the relativity and the state of flux. Bourriaud critiques the radicalism of modernity, its fascination of cultural roots and origins, instead favoring the alter-modern state – a plant that carries its own roots when moving from a to b, and from b to c, in contrast to the rhizome, which stays in contact with all its parts simultaneously. If the postmodern man is trapped in his own roots, the “alter modern man” is trapped in a state of constant movement. This is an attempt to release oneself from the cultural determinism that connects people to their cultural origins, benefiting an art that travels in both time and space.

As Duchamp, who carried his whole artistic practice in a suitcase, the nomadic artist travels light. But the nomadic artist can also travel far, as for example Pierre Huyghe who arranged an expedition to the South Pole. When returning from the actual journey, Huyghe chose to stage the journey in Central Park in New York, by using stage sets and light installations. There are also artists who have turned disappearance into art. The mythologized Bas Jan Ader’s last voyage across the Atlantic negates all logic of representation, but his iconoclastic disappearance paradoxically also becomes the most spectacular journey and the ultimate artwork. Did Ader risk his life for the sake of art or did art become an excuse for something else?

There is a strong relation between walking and thinking. In Wanderlust. A History of Walking, the American writer Rebecca Solnit addresses the importance of finding time and space to walk in our accelerating present time. She dreads that the rapid modern life might even be faster than we and than our thoughts. Consequently, man must find his way back to the natural rhythm of life by walking or by using more natural means of transportation. The wanderer is also the key figure of the Enlightenment. In Confessions, Rousseau admitted that he was only able to think when walking. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau and Kierkegaard also used the meditative walk as a condition for writing. The French structuralist Jean-Christophe Bailly has spoken of the generative grammar of the legs, whereas the French philosopher Michel de Certeau claimed that ”the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language”. In art as well as in philosophy, the walk is on top of the hierarchy. Flying has always been associated with hubris and the will to overcome one’s limitations. In our constantly faster world, to walk, cycle or horseback ride turns not only into an ecological way of transport, but also into an ideological action of resistance. But what if the resistance is transmitted from “above”, from a teacher who extends a personal art project within the framework of education? Did Another Way turn into a romantic utopia or into a conventional art school project? And how is the project related to the idea of the artist as a nomad in a mobile society, where capital, values and human relations are in flux.

When I was contacted to write this text, I traveled to Stockholm to meet with all the students and teachers who participated in the journey. The experience of meeting them in person and to listen to their stories and insights from their challenging journeys was an incredibly strong experience. Our conversations were about art, but just as much about existential issues, and they turned as much into storytelling as into storylistening.

Filippa Barkman’s work Still south I went and west and south again is a naked figure with the back turned to the viewer. Its lack of a front, a face, eyes and features makes it impossible to identify. However one turns, the figure is always turning away. The figure can be seen as androgynous. It is standing in a waiting, watching position, captured within itself. Barkman also exhibits the video work What will be will be, with recordings of people she met along the way.

Sofia Bäcklund cycled to Wanås together with Filippa Barkman. Bäcklund’s sculptures for the exhibition are inspired by several stops during the journey, but also by sites in Stockholm. As soon as you leave a site, or before arriving to one, the place is an abstraction. The simple necessity of only being able to be at one place at one time is evident in her sculptures as well as the interaction between physical reality and imagination in our everyday life. One part of the work is shown in the Konsthall, the other in the Park. They lack direct contact, but are still connected to one another – they separate and they unite, like different versions of the same story.

Magnus Dahl cycled on his grandfather’s old bike and slept in a hand-made trolley. Already before the trip started, Dahl had an interest in phenomena such as safety and living conditions, which is evident in his work for the exhibition. Dahl has created sculptures, where the form resembles a bird’s nest, sites of protection and rest.

Klas Eriksson chose to stage a fictional journey in his studio. Every day he walked for four hours on a non-electrical treadmill, wearing a sailors costume symbolizing the lonely sailor out at sea. The stationary journey deals with the fictional transforming into the pure personal imaginary trip. Eriksson is particularly interested in expressions of the benefit of art and relates this to his own experiences during the trip. Aspects of the gray zone between reality, truth and fiction are evident in his work. At the opening Eriksson will perform a storytelling performance on a bench. The treadmill, which carried him the 370 miles, is shown in the Konsthall together with his sailor suit and sound recordings from his walk.

Paul Fägerskiöld participated in a survival course, bird watching and a tour around the reserve capital of Sweden. Educational ideals, manhood, identity and the relation of the urban citizen to nature, were some of the aspects that Fägerskiöld explored. The symbolic meaning of all those who looked at the map saying “here we are” are questioned in his work. Was this statement really a fact? Fägerskiöld shows paintings that relate to the flash fiction genre, where the short and harsh tone contains a whole world, and can be compared with texts by Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn”.

Virlani Hallberg’s and Jennifer Rainsford’s fictionalized journey resulted in the film Our Global Behaviour is Phychopathic, a highly aestheticized thriller that takes place between four female characters on a boat. Through the characters A, B, C and Dä they bind together personality features such as submission and self-effacement with frictions between countries and ideologies on a macro-level. A change in personality as well as a staging of the psychopathic structures of world politics and the narcissistic, non-empathic and manipulative behaviors of nations is played out on the boat.

Peter Holm’s and Éva Mag’s journey by bicycle was transformed into a journey full of performativity. As Cupcake Experience they made improvised recordings staged on the site where they raised their tent; in the woods, on a field or by a lake. Their video Where day meets night, that’s where I want to be is based on recordings and experiences from their project. At the opening Holm and Mag are also doing a performance.

Malin Holmberg walked to Wanås by herself. Her project was influenced by the turquoise color of the Maya Indians, symbolizing a “fifth direction” and used for painting their offerings. Subjective color symbolism is of particular interest to her, and during her journey she seeked to find colors as signs of her movements and directions. For every day of the trip Holmberg made one painting, registering her emotions and experiences. She shows these paintings in the Konsthall as well as a site-specific painting in the Park.

Ingela Ihrman and Christina Langert cycled to Wanås on a tandem bicycle made for disabled people inspired by Werner Herzog’s documentary Land of Silence and Darkness about a deaf and blind woman. Ihrman and Langert tried to recreate this state of isolation by alternating in blocking their sight and hearing. Their works are inspired by their overnight stays in the parish houses of countryside churches along the way, as well as from the journey in isolation.

Jakob Ingemansson is interested in the architectural structures that are needed to provide the flow of information in our society. Since he chose to cycle without a map he became especially attentive of, and dependent on, cell phone masts, servers and mail boxes. His work for the exhibition deals with a physical materiality as well as a constructed narrative in these apparently immaterial structures. Thus, Ingemansson attempts to show the aesthetic and the performative potential within this architecture.

Nils Johansson sailed towards Wanås by himself. He was a first time sailor but, in the spirit of Dumbo, he tried to accomplish the impossible. Soon, the journey became a struggle, to the point that his dream broke and he decided to quit. Now, he is instead hoping that Dumbo can help someone else. Somewhere in the Park, the small elephant is waiting to be found and cared for.

Mikael Lindahl cycled to Wanås together with Jakob Ingemansson. Lindahl has a special interest in the remains that human activity leaves behind and how we try to create an entirety out of fragments. Along the way Lindahl encountered an old barn filled with old appliances, a stuffed fox, pinball machines and a furnished room, a place which he believed was a hideout for thieves. At Wanås he has also found the ruins of a house which he has chosen to investigate by relieving its foundation. The documentations from these eerie sites are both shown as video installations in Konsthallen.

Kerstin Palm’s trip resulted in the work PHYSICAL ACTIVITY, a textual exercise that tries to find the logic in irrational actions somewhere in between act and documentation. In a dreamlike and subversive scenario two fictional translators are trying to describe the other’s position and path through the landscape. The material is published as a soft cover book in a limited edition, and is sold from the trunk of a car somewhere in Östra Göinge.

Annette Felleson, a teacher at the Royal Royal Institute of Art, rode to Wanås. The journey on horseback resulted in an interest in the origin and meaning of the road. The road originates from the path, which is constructed by people and animals in their need of communication between two sites. The path is shaped through a continuous movement along the same way. In the work The Path in the Wanås Park, Felleson is dealing with the internal processes generated by this type of movement. She rides the path during the same amount of days (38) that the original trip lasted. She thereby creates a mental performance, challenging basic human capacities.

For the initiator, Ann-Sofi Sidén, the journey is a metaphor for our journeys through life with its inherent diversity. Her aim with Another Way is to create a collective situation for the students, where their selection of means of transport becomes a formal input and a vehicle for thought. Of course the project had its didactic elements, such as lectures and group discussions at the school, at the same time as Sidén with Another Way wanted to escape the institution. “By finding parameters that generate fertile questions, I tried to invite the students into their own working processes through another door.” Sidén and Felleson traveled by horse via the suburbs of Stockholm, the farming landscapes and university towns of Sörmland and Östergötland, to the depopulated areas in Småland. Along the way they stayed with various people, from huts to castles. The daily change of environment and encounters guided by their basic and immediate needs made them look at things from a different perspective. The journey turned into a freedom ritual, “which also claimed the right for adventure in the public realm. The anachronistic action of two riders’ long ride during normal working hours gives the reading of history and the

experience of the present a needed distance to itself.” Sidén points out that they got an image of the world in a scale of 1:1, where the physical struggle, but also the notion of time, became evident. What is time? Sidén felt as if they traveled on a road which ran parallel to the existing society and offered an understanding of one’s place here on earth, and a subjective experience of time. To observe this one must make time pass by slower than usual. The project can be compared to the restless Faust’s contract with the devil. When Faust asks for the time to stop, i.e. to halt modernity, he has to give up his own life. It takes great courage to ask for the moment to pause, to be satisfied with the present. At Wanås, Sidén shows a version of her new, four-channel video installation Somewhere in Sweden, a mobile montage of video, sound recordings and photographs from the 38 day long horseback ride through Sweden.

Another Way is filled with paradoxes. It was both organized within the framework of the institution and formed an escape from traditional institutionalization, didactic and experimental, collectivistic and individualistic, critical of modernity yet timely anachronistic of the same. The image of the free nomadic artist, free to travel wherever he pleases, was restricted by a number of agreed rules that gave a firm contour to the mobility. In that way the project became a search for a collective ideological foundation at the same time as controlling this search by institutional regulations. Sometimes one has to accept the rules of the game to be able to find the personal game from inside. And to do this, one has to put all cynicism and preconceptions aside. To end this textual journey I quote an unknown person: “The longest journey a man must ever make is the 18 centimeters from the brain to the heart”.

Sinziana Ravini

Sinziana Ravini works as a curator and an art critic. She writes for Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs-Posten, SITE, Glänta, Artforum, Frog, and Be Contemporary.

This text was first published in the catalog WANÅS 2010.