To Keep Oneself in Motion
MFA-essay 2007
© Märit Aronsson
translation Paul Parker

[journey]
I think well when I travel. There is something about moving through a landscape; the movement transposes itself into the mind. Thoughts don’t come to a standstill but simply continue, one does not rigidify as long as one finds oneself in motion, everything flows, step by step, breath by breath, frame by frame.

Småland, Sweden. Summer and warm. Dry – and a sweet earthy scent from the forest as I opened the car window. Or maybe I didn’t open the window; maybe I only imagined how it was, ther outside. All the miles I’ve travelled, all the trees that have passed by. They make me pass by myself, come to places within myself that are at once new and old. It was this barren wood of skinny pines that made me want to film. The thought came one summer – and the next summer I took a film camera with me.

I move across a map. Or over a map, or through. As in a CAD-program on the computer where one can twist and turn a surface and see it from many angles. I am swimming down through the sea of air until I have the horizon precisely at eye-hight and lie there and hover for a while. I see everything in intersection and find myself over, under and in. Simultaneously.

[distance - abstraction]
When something gets near enough or far enough away it becomes abstract. Maps and satellite pictures could represent something inside the body or a tiny molecule. I have made abstract woodcuts that are a kind of maps of inner states. I have photographed landscapes both from the air and the ground, and seen those images as some kind of coninuation of the abstract woodcuts. They are representational but nonetheless abstract. The important thing is the patterns in the image, the patterns in nature. They give me a feeling of belonging and thereby safety. I am a part of the world, a part of the pattern.

The film Path is barely two minutes long and shows a pathway filmed from a ski-lift. One rides slowly forward right over the treetops. The camera has the same angle the whole time; it just registers that which passes directly under the lift. Mostly it’s snow when one rides a ski-lift, so most of us don’t have this reference of motif, speed and distance. The distance is a little confusing just because one does not have any easily recognisable reference points; one is instead reffered to the path and the small birch trees at the edges. But it is not obvious what the scale is; is the path a dried out riverbed or are those trees actually hugely enlarged moss?

[different states]
In my films there is a recurring atmosphere that I consider to be both unpleasant and delightful. One can recognise it from horror films; in a creepiness that broods over a forest, an uncertainty as to what is hiding between the trees, or what awaits one in the misty landscape. One senses that something is going to happen. It is beautiful and at the same time close to the abysmally deep, unknown terror. Here is a parallel to the transition, the grey zone or gradiation between different states, such as lies between being awake and being asleep, between attraction and repulsion and freedom and restriction.

In the film Transitions (3 min. 16 sec.) I have filmed through the window of an aeroplane whist it takes off from the ground and flies higher and higher up into the air. One follows the entire journey – at first taking an ordinary human perspective on the trees outside of the window – until everything one can see just becomes more and more abstract. The forest and water courses build patterns way down below, and then one enters a cloud and everything turns grey. Then the cloud disperses and through the openings one glimpses the landscape again.

In Buoyancy/Gravity ( 3 min. 20 sec.) the camera stands completely still pointing at a tarpaulin that flaps loose from the car it is intended to cover. The car is parked between two buildings and in that space a powerful whirlwind is created that takes hold of the tarpaulin. Had it not been tied fast to the car it would have blown away. For me this is about breathing. That there is not really a huge difference between being able to breath and not being able to breath. Where is the boundary? It changes quickly. The freedom one can feel and the claustrophobia, they are near to each other. To breath in freedom but at the same time be unable to breath; loose oneself in movement, a flow of air, slowly or uncontrollably fast in a gust, a strong wind; be blown right in the face and weightless be carried along with the air streams.

I had seen the car with the tarpaulin on the way home from University several times, stopped and observed the crumples in the tarpaulin that lay pasted to the car bonnet. I became sort of hypnotised and I just wanted to stand there and look at how it moved. But every time I passed by either a lack of light or a lack of time prevented me from going to get the film camera. In the end I went there anyway but was near to turning around when I saw that the tarpaulin had come half loose. But I filmed anyway, just because I had gone there. And so the result turned out completely different than I had intended, and much better.

To make art is for me to be concentratedly present and simultaneosly unconscious and oblivious. To have those exact tools that originate in experience and a craftsmanlike understanding of the material, and at the same time fumble with the unknown.

[the uncanny]
The term the uncanny signifies a kind of experience: mainly one of discomfort but also of recognition. The uncomfortable leads us back to the familiar. It is about repressed memories from early childhood, before we had words. A kind of return of the repressed, in veiled form…