No you without Mountains, without Sun, without Sky 
(2017, sound & video installation)

18:31 min loop, 1920 x 1080, HD, H.264, AAC, 5.1 sound. Headphones and dark undisturbed location advised. 
Sound scape created in collaboration with musician and sounds artist Alexander Holm.

In her book “ A Field Guide to Getting Lost” Rebecca Solnit writes about how the Native American Wintu people in North-central California are using the cardinal directions to describe their own bodies and position. This represents a worldview where the self goes beyond ones ego and exists in relation to and in connection with the nature and the rest of the world. There is for the Wintu people, as Solnit writes: “No you without Mountains, without Sun, without Sky”. 

The current epoch of the Anthropocene, however, represents a predominantly different position. Executing unrestricted exploitation of the earth transforming the ecosystem without concern for depleting resources, global consequences and the wellbeing of the future (generations), the general sense of self is perceived as superior to other beings sentient or otherwise. As the name suggests the epoch is the result of an anthropocentric worldview reinforced by capitalist ideals.

The project “No you without Mountains, without Sun, without Sky” is a counter reaction to this demeanour. It is a search for a lost connection to the earth and the nature focusing on a non-anthropocentric understanding of self as part of a greater biome.

By using both the photographic medium, moving images and sound, the project intends to draw on the synergies between stillness (both in photography and as extended to moving images), slowness and the perception of space and position of the self through sound. The process is an integral part of the project. Hence, photographing, filming and recording sounds in nature, the methodology for the project is focusing on meditation and breathing exercises, listening, walking, wandering and slowness.

The intention is to mediate to the viewer an experience of presence in and connection to nature; a kinship of sorts and recognition of a shared “bodily vulnerability”, as the French writer and philosopher George Bataille so beautifully describes it. Although Bastaille is referring to a “creaturely brotherhood” shared between pre-historic humans and animals, this philosophy is fittingly extended to a kinship between all beings – a lost genetic memory to be recovered.