WEAVERS
Audio & video installation, Akershus Kunstsenter (2012)
Weavers is a sound and video installation for 3 screens and 6 audio channels, first shown at Akershus Kunstnersenter as part of Langgård´s solo exhibition WEAVERS.
Performative elements from dance, sound and music meet in a musically choreographed scenario for three performers: a percussionist, a violinist and a dancer, resulting in a complex sound installation in the gallery room.
Each scene takes place in a dark room, and through lighting, scenography and camera movement, optical illusions are created, giving an experience of deconstructed bodies in a baroque, esthetic universe with dark undercurrents.
The dancer is dragging a pile of organic material, stuck to her body, in reptile like movements, a heavy body work in a series of collapses, creating a soundscape of crackling, dry sounds, and meaty body sounds. The violinist manipulates different strings strung through the room, as well as other resonating objects, creating shimmering overtones and noisy disharmony. The percussionist plays on stone, wood, tile, shells, glass and porcelain, materials that throughout the piece become completely destructed by her playing.
The piece revolves around preservation and destruction, touching on mythological motifs through repetition, build ups and collapses.
Close to vegetation and soil, our gaze lowers to the tingling chaos of the woods, and another intention is outlined, strange, but still, through Langgård´s images, it is a real opposing answer to our own gaze. Through this, a double room for comparative investigation is opened up, a sneaking view finder that both penetrates what we are, and still binds us to its point of view. Langgård moves into the becoming-an-animal (devenir-animal), as described by Gilles Deleuze og Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (…) The point is not to mimic the animal, of pretend to be not human, but to dissolve what is human through gestures and processes already present within us, but subjected to an anthropocentric scheme. When a woman moves staccato and wobbles out of unknown intentional storylines, when she is creeping through the vegetation and hiding her face, what we see is not the cultivated, high held femininity, but a crawling organic form related to the insect or the snake or vegetation´s own gurgling cycles.
Kunstkritikk.no
COMPOSER/DIRECTOR Ingvild Langgård
CHOREOGRAPHY & DANCE Ingri Fiksdal
PERCUSSIONIST Ane Marthe Sørlien Holen
VIOLINIST Gunhild Mathea Olaussen
PHOTOGRAPHY & GRADING Morten Halfstad Forsberg
B-PHOTO Jon André Hakvåg
SCENOGRAPHY ASSISTANT Gunhild Mathea Olaussen
SOUND ENGINEERING, SOUND DESIGN & PYROTECHNICS Rune Baggerud
EDITED BY Christoffer Heie
SUPPORTED BY Norsk Kulturråd, Fond for lyd og bilde, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, Billedkunstnernes Hjelpefond
Below is the full video showing all three screens simultaneously