Film: Everyday Archives II (Flyers 1998-2008), 2013
2013, single channel HD video with voice-over, 12.24 min
Text and narration in English by Malin Pettersson Öberg
Camera: Shiva Anoushirvani. Distribution: Filmform
In Everyday Archives II (Flyers 1998 – 2008) we hypnotically follow the presentation of images from an archive of flyers, postcards and invitations that the artist collected during travels to various European cities. The paper documents are arranged slowly two and two by gloved hands, on top of a table. In the sequence, visual and conceptual connections between the images occur. We listen to a voice-over reading quotes and notes on the mechanisms of selection and collecting; on time, transience and the ephemeral; on classification and trompe l’ oeil paintings from the 1600s where personal letters, printed matter and sketches were depicted in illusionist ways; on objects and their relations to our identity. The film is an adaptation of a digital slide-show from 2006 (Flyers 1998-2005), which reflects on the archive’s composition and the format of the travelogue. It relates to essayist storytelling and examines the boundaries between words and images, the general and the personal, narrativity and abstraction, displaying and hiding.
Everyday Archives II (Flyers 1998-2008) was conceived prior to the exhibition Last Dance at Galerie Gourvennec Ogor in Marseille, curated by Le Syndicat Magnifique as one of the closing events of the Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013. From 2014 the work is part of Filmform – The Art Film & Video Archive and has been screened in the 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and at Bio Rio in Stockholm. Camera: Shiva Anoushirvani, color correction: Linda Hofvander, technical advices: Emanuel Almborg, co-distribution: Filmform
« Quodlibet – a form of Trompe-l’œil painting practiced by Dutch artists between 1655 and 1675. In these compositions, small objects such as letters, prints, sketches and work tools were suspended with ribbons against a wooden background. They were then depicted in three-dimensional, illusionist ways, often to convey a story of the artist in coded form. […] In the book Looking at the Overlooked I read: Taxonomy is the name given to the branch of knowledge that deals with classification; the taxonomist takes a body of phenomena (plants, animals) and groups them into species and genera, according to criteria which the taxonomist creates for the purpose of analysis. By placing objects side to side we can compare them. We can discover their differences and similarities. By isolating them we can study them. How is this black color different from this black? »
Excerpt from the voice-over (download full transcript in English here)