BIRDWATCHING
11. April 2008, Norwegian Theatre Academy, Fredrikstad, Norway
Tutored by Ong Keng Sen
THE INSTALLATION
The space is filled with a very small story that grows out of an open window and disappear. A big part of the room is covered with untouched, white paper that you cannot walk on without destroying it. Beyond the paper there are small boxes with text, some floating in the air, some on a mirror, some on the wall. As an audience you are invited to step onto a narrow chair and look through a couple of binoculars that hang from the ceiling. They enable you to read the story in the boxes, bit by bit as you find them in your view. The last word, for those who follow the path, is placed outside the open window on a green field by the river rushing by. A high frequent tone of a finger's play on glass fills the space every now and then.
THE TRAVEL
One sunday afternoon during my first months in Fredrikstad I went on a bicycle ride through my neighborhood: a huge industrial area called Øra. The area is located on a piece of land pointing out into the delta where the river Glomma meets the sea. I passed factories of every size, smell and shape until I at the pointy end encountered the closed-off area of the local dump. Since it was a quiet sunday afternoon I decided to ignore the roadblock and continued my bicycle ride between towering piles of sorted garbage. But the piles of rubbish soon flattened out and was, to my astonishment, replaced with a vast, orange field of willows stretching out into the sea in front of me. I found myself facing a beautiful nature preserve with the last, ironic outpost of society right behind me. And even on the last, overgrown pile of garbage there was built a small bird observatory that with it's tiny existence claimed a buffer zone, a nomansland, between the manmade and the wildlife. As if it guarded some kind of fragile treaty between the two. I felt intensely drawn towards the field in front of me, but without swimming or flying I simply could not go there.
Tutored by Ong Keng Sen
THE INSTALLATION
The space is filled with a very small story that grows out of an open window and disappear. A big part of the room is covered with untouched, white paper that you cannot walk on without destroying it. Beyond the paper there are small boxes with text, some floating in the air, some on a mirror, some on the wall. As an audience you are invited to step onto a narrow chair and look through a couple of binoculars that hang from the ceiling. They enable you to read the story in the boxes, bit by bit as you find them in your view. The last word, for those who follow the path, is placed outside the open window on a green field by the river rushing by. A high frequent tone of a finger's play on glass fills the space every now and then.
THE TRAVEL
One sunday afternoon during my first months in Fredrikstad I went on a bicycle ride through my neighborhood: a huge industrial area called Øra. The area is located on a piece of land pointing out into the delta where the river Glomma meets the sea. I passed factories of every size, smell and shape until I at the pointy end encountered the closed-off area of the local dump. Since it was a quiet sunday afternoon I decided to ignore the roadblock and continued my bicycle ride between towering piles of sorted garbage. But the piles of rubbish soon flattened out and was, to my astonishment, replaced with a vast, orange field of willows stretching out into the sea in front of me. I found myself facing a beautiful nature preserve with the last, ironic outpost of society right behind me. And even on the last, overgrown pile of garbage there was built a small bird observatory that with it's tiny existence claimed a buffer zone, a nomansland, between the manmade and the wildlife. As if it guarded some kind of fragile treaty between the two. I felt intensely drawn towards the field in front of me, but without swimming or flying I simply could not go there.