Everything Related to Hurt

A performance based on and about language.

During my conversation with a French girl in which we were taking about our work, I asked if she ever took photographs. She told me, that the previous summer she had documented everything related to hurt. Something I found really interesting in relation to her work on love. It was only a few minutes later I realized, that she had in fact said everything related to heart and had pronounced heart in a French way, leaving the ea sounding like a u.

I could not get the sentence out of my head. Everything related to hurt. It somehow sound intriguing and to me much more interesting and profound than everything related to heart. Therefore I decided to take it on as a working title for a future project, that I at that point didn’t know what was going to be.

What is hurt and what does it involve?

I find that most times we hurt ourselves through our perception of the actions of other people, more than their actual intend to hurt us.

What I mean by this is that hurt is often induced from within, a negative value added to an action of another person.

If your lover fails to say he loves you, it hurts because you want him to; if you cannot get over a past lover it isn’t because of him but your own inability to let him go, hence you keep hurting yourself by constantly reaffirming a love not reciprocated; if there is caused trouble in paradise it is often because of misreading and wrong interpretations.

We create the hurt through our private language; we speak towards others though they cannot hear us, thus hurt is dependent on someone else and yet much more on our own expectations to this individual

In this performance I am exploring my private language, toward various men in my life; by trying to speak my inner language out loud, my perception of things that are not necessarily true.

I will be performing this, Saturday the 4^th in the “Direct Action” festival, a part of “The Month Of Performance Art Berlin”. In case you are in the area you should come check it out.

It Only Blooms - Full Version!

Here is a chance for everyone to take a look inside my most recent work. Physically there only exists 5 copies, but I would like to share it with everyone who wants to see it. I realize that some can be tricky to read as it is upside down, but the idea is that you should be able to read it from both ways as it tell two different stories.

It Only Blooms!

For the past three month I have been working intensely on this project. The idea of doing something around this Søren Kierkegaard quote started last summer, but up until now it has been resting in the pile of unrealized ideas. 
The book shows a blooming process through photographs, seasonal and of the singular flower. Along side is a love story, which is related to the emotional seasons of love. The book can be read from both sides, one side telling the story of him the other of her. The photographs has been taken a bit everywhere but most of them doing the past month. The realization of the book (printing, binding etc.) took me a couple of weeks work in the workshop.
This book project is my first, but it is safe to say it wont be my last.

From Quote To Project!

A little less than a year ago I started reading "Kjærlighedens Gjerninger" (Works on Love) By Søren Kierkegaard. 
I came across this quote which has been been stuck in my mind since then. I wanted to develop a project based on it as I wanted to share its truth and beauty with others.
Ever since I have been trying to figure out what would be the best way of getting across this message, and lately I have devoted most of my time to finishing this project, which I soon will be able to share with the rest of the world. 
First here is the quote in the original danish version and after my personal English translation for those who don't speak Danish.  

"Men hvert træ kjendes på sin egen frugt, saaledes ogsaa Kjerligheden på dens egne, og den kjerlighed, om hvilken Christendommen taler, paa dens egen frugt: at den har Evigheden sandhed I sig. Al anden Kjerlighed, hvad enten den, menneskeligt talt, tidlig afblomstre og forandres, eller den elskeligt bevarer sig I timelighedens aarstid: den er dog forgængelig, den blomstre kun. Dette er just det skrøbelige og det vemodige ved den, hvad enten den blomstrer en time eller 70 Aar, den blomstre kun; men den kristelige kjerlighed er evig. Derfor vil ingen, hvis han forstaar sig selv, vil falde paa at besynge den. Thi hvad digteren skal besynge maa have det vemod, som er hans eget Livs Gaade: maa blomstrer, og hvad der blomstrer det forgaaer, man hvad der er kan ikke besynges det maa troes og maa leves."

"But every tree is recognized by its own fruit, thus as well love on its own, and this love, on which Christianity speaks, on its own fruit: that it has the truth of eternity within. Every other love, whether it humanly speaking, early withers or changes, or it is lovingly retained in the temporal season; it is but perishable, it only blooms. This is just its fragility and sadness, whether it blooms for an hour or 70 years, it only blooms; but the Christian love is eternal. Therefore no one will, if he understands himself, think of praising it. For what the poet must praise must contain this pathos, which is the riddle of his own life: will bloom, and what blooms must vanish, but what is cannot be praised it must be believed and must be lived"

Language Simplicity!

Il me demande et il me dit

J’écoute

Je réponds

Ensemble on va faire les choses extraordinaires

Absolument

Il me regards pas.

Il me dit pas, mais j’écoute lui.

Je lui plais? Je ne sais pas.

Peut-être

Il me plait ? Je crois

Je sais d’aimer

Je sais de coucher.

Mais je ne sais pas rien de faire l’amour

Lately I have been thinking a lot about sex and love in relation to each other, why we tent to combine the two when they are in fact two separate things. Something is of a bodily nature and something belongs to what is beyond, but we still combine them into the monogamous romantic relationship. 

I have a hard time getting my thoughts together on this subject. I know my point of view but I still can’t justify it completely, I can’t even explain it very well not even to my self.  Therefore I thought I would try and put it into the form of a poem. Maybe it is not a poem; maybe it is just a gathering of thoughts. But then isn’t that what poetry is? To express something deep and quite not figured out in a very simple fashion, and then leave the rest up to the reader?

I have never really written poetry before but it came naturally to me, also to write this in French. I realize that sometimes philosophers are trying to put their thoughts on a higher level by using words that no ordinary man will understand. I know that I sometimes try to increase the use of “difficult” words when I write because I think it will be more expressive. But what if the language can be simple and still explain? What if all we really need is a simple language to explain our most profound thoughts? That is why it came naturally to write it in French, I didn’t attempt to do it in neither Danish nor English or German. There are simply too many words I can choose from. So instead I resort to a language I don’t master where I can only speak so much; to keep it simple and not with great difficulty but because it is my only capability. 

A Photowalk!

I have been rereading the Moyra Davey essay on Photography and accident. It is funny how much more it makes sense to me now than when I read it for the first time 1 ½ year ago right after starting school.  

The other day I took a long walk to get some thoughts together and brought both my analogue and digital camera. Promised myself not to defer from taking all the pictures that I wanted. I sometimes have a tendency to hold myself back. Maybe do to the mass of photographs already collected through the past couple of years, but perhaps also because of a slight dissatisfaction of the results, because in the quest of the perfectly composed photograph how can one not be.

Bringing both my analogue and digital camera and with an essay in mind I though I might try and implement the way I take pictures on film onto my digital camera and actually let the accident happen. It is a fact that I am much more spontaneous photographer when it comes to the analogue medium. Sharpness is not of great importance to me, in fact the more unreal the image seem to be, the more I like it. But with my digital camera where I am able to see the result right away, and retake it if I am dissatisfied, I am much more critical and far less forgiving.

So I engaged in my own experiment, where I took the digital pictures much more sporadically and in the process I somehow managed to gain some of the wildness and unreal feeling which I cherish so much in analogue photography. 

On Body And What Is Outside!

As I was reading a transcribed in class conversation with Jean-Luc Nancy from European graduate school I came across what I think must have been one of the most simple and beautiful ways to describe a body that I have ever encountered.

“-For me the body is first a hole, a tube if you want, and around the tube is a skin. The first character of this topology is that it is a resounding thing. The air can go through the tube and you have the skin over it and you produce music. The body is at first a certain sound, and that sound is the voice. “

I don’t know why this struck me to be anything in particular, when you are reading it you might think nothing special of it. Yet I can’t get the image of the tube rapped in a skin out of my head. And I’ve been looking at an empty toilet role standing on my kitchen table all weekend taking it up to my ear and trying to listen to its sound.

It might be because I’ve lately been confronted with the fact that I need to be better at visualizing my ideas and experimenting in order to evolve my work. I always saw myself as a visual person but at this moment I am very keen on words.

In this particular conversation Nancy was talking about love and how love is to give what one does not have; it is to give the nothingness. It makes perfect sense to me that we give something that we don’t know what is and that we are not sure we have, cause in fact we can’t explain why we love someone but yet we offer them our love without being sure of what it is that we are offering. Love is lying somewhere outside the corpus. We can’t cut it open and locate the love and dissect it and explain what exactly it is that we give and why we choose to give it to certain people; and yet we need the corpus to embody the love.

I feel that somehow love is also outside of language because I will never be able to describe the nothingness I am giving. I can say “I love you” but what does that really mean? I can say that to my mother or a friend or my lover but it will have different meaning, and as Roland Barthes states it even means something different every time I should say it to my lover. It is just words that are no way covering what it is I want to utter, not that I am even sure about that either.

I find this to be very interesting exactly because I can’t express it in words. Here again I have this question of visualization. I wonder if it is possible to visualize the nothingness through the body and its actions, even though I am not aware of what the nothing is.

When I feel pain I take my hand and hold it to the place of my body where the pain is located. That is an easy visualization of that there is something wrong. But exactly because love lies outside the body and is dependent on something outside the self it makes it hard to visualize without putting it into words, which are also not a sufficient medium.

So I guess my struggle right now concerning this matter is that I am looking for a way to visualize love without making references to red hearts and the cheesy commercial idea of what love is. To make something that people can recognize and hopefully see some truth in, that is no easy task.

Eros 2 - Symposium Project - Part 2!

I recently finished my first film in "The Symposium Series". I have chosen to call it "Eros 2" since it is the second speech in "The Symposium".  
The protagonist is Ansy. A french girl who came to London as a reaction to her break up after a long passionate and complicated relationship. 
Based on my idea of finding the lack after a break up I had decided to look on love and promises as a series of actions rather than something spoken. It is indeed ourselves who decide what actions we choose to see as a promise and what we expect of our partner based on these actions. 
When I first met Ansy one thing from all the thing she told me really made an impact on me , which was this: Her ex-girlfriend was a musician and so naturally a large part of their relationship was occupied by music. As a reaction to the breakup she isolated herself from all music, she left her Ipod behind in France and went to London in the hope to forget. 
Personally I could not bare the thought of living without music, I think that most people consider music to be one of the most influential factors in their daily life. Music can change one's state of mind, it can make one happy, sad, thoughtful etc. and if we are without it such a large part of who we are would be lost.
She said this to me: "The day she left me, the music left my life" and therefore I wanted to make the film about the pathos that follows a life without music. 

Tonight it will be shown in The White Chapel Gallery in London. This is very exiting to me and at the same time a bit terrifying since it is the first time I show a film while I am there and have to talk about it with someone else than my tutor. It will be great though to get some reactions and see how I feel about the situation myself.

Symposium project-part 1!

What I am currently working on is based on “The Symposium” by Plato. I read this text for the first time back in high school and have always found it a great piece. The Past year I have been playing with the idea to transform it into seven short films; each one representing one of the seven speeches in the book.

For those who are not familiar with the Symposium: In short it is a Symposium where great thinkers of the ancient Greece Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades) comes together to have a drinking party, but because of festivities the night before everyone is tired and they decide instead to each make a speech in praise of Eros (the God of love).

The first speech I decided to deal with is the speech of Pausanias. He talks about how there is an earthly and a heavenly love (Pandemos/Eros).

Eros has no female element. It is the love between men, which exist out of the noble thought of gaining or giving knowledge.  Pandemos on the other hand is the heterosexual love; a love between mortals where the desire of the body is the essential part. What I found interesting about this speech was that he talks about how the lover stemming from Pandemos is never stable because the desire of his object is never stable.

“…And therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over he takes wings and flies away in spite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble disposition is life-long for it becomes one with the everlasting”.

A promise made out of love is not a promise. As soon as the love will die the promise will no longer exist and neither Gods nor humans will condemn a lover for his transgression. It is this temporary state of love that I used as outpoint for my research.

I started reading “Works of Love” by Søren Kierkegaard. It feels quite nice for once to read philosophy in my mother tongue that is not a translation.

Until now what struck me the most is that he in relation to love between humans writes this:

“Love only blooms”

Whether it is one hour or seventy years it only blooms. I find this statement to be very true and it relates to the Symposium project in the sense that I have chosen to deal with the temporality of love and relationships.

Everything that blooms also has the potential to die. Flowers bloom but always die, and the plant may get new flowers but they will not be the same. So to say that love only blooms, is to say that love will die.

In relation to this I will be looking at post break-up emotions. Those promises that we give and the things we do together while we are in a love relation; things that are easy to say and actions that seems natural, which we don’t even consider because we are in love; how heavy do they weigh when a relationship is over and how long does it keep having an effect in our lives? What are the things we remember and why, and where is the lack?

Jemand War-Leer!

Until Friday this week I am taking part of an exhibition called Raum in Betrieb! It is the 4th time this event takes place in Halle (Saale), Germany.
The idea is to take an empty house and for one week make it into an exhibition space. Each artist gets a room for their proposed project. 
This work centers around the past life of a room. The piece consists of 6 photographs, all of objects that could have occupied the space and 4 different sound pieces to accompany them. The sound pieces are narrative moments. A glimpse into someones life.
Combined I hope to make the viewer compose their own stories of the people who once lived there. 

"Jemand War-Leer", copyright Dorthe Slej Pedersen 2012

KBH K!

6 months ago I made this video about (to me) a special place in Copenhagen.

For many years I was thinking about making a film about it. The many different people who visit it and the people who work there who must have had many weird experiences though the years. With the station being a center of thousand of travelers every day and its location which is next to a street of prostitution and drug addicts, this place must contain so many stories.

It turned out to be a quite different video than first intended. When I returned to Copenhagen after being away for 2 years I found out that it was newly closed. I saw this as my last chance to make a documentation of a place where I also have memories from. Even though it ended up being without any people in it, I find that the absence of them is indeed quite loud.

CPH C from Dorthe Pedersen on Vimeo.