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.

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. 

I Don’t Cry Over Spilt Milk!

After a weekend of taking what could have been the best pictures of my life. I return the camera and go to the darkroom. I was super pleased with the last medium format black and white pictures I took, and I have acquired a taste for black and white photography that I never thought I would.

To my horror vision all the negatives turn out completely dark. My first thought is “what did I do wrong” but the truth is that everything I did was exactly as always except the camera was different!

The only way I can express what I really feel is by lending a word from the Danish or German language. 

What I feel is ærgrelse or ärger.

The closest could be regret or disappointment, but it’s neither, perhaps a mixture? Cause can I regret something that I can’t blame on myself? In fact I can blame no one ærgelse is something that either can be with or without a recipient of blame. It holds an element of disappointment and annoyance, but is much less stronger than regret.  The closest I could come to this expression when looking thought the thesaurus is “vex”. I have never heard any English speaking person use this term nor have I seen it written, whereas in Danish and German language it is a word, which is in frequent use.  

I am disappointed never to get to see my pictures. But within lies also a feeling of wasting time. I have spent time walking around choosing each frame carefully as there are only 12 pictures on each film and put time into developing in the darkroom. All I am left with is 3 blank roll of films, and that is ærgeligt/ärgerlich.

At the same time as having this feeling of ærgrelse, I can’t help but think that this is the name of the game when you take analog photographs. It is always unknown if anything will appear until the development is done. There is an anticipation, which spans over a long period of time, from the moment where the film is inserted into the camera until the negatives are finished developing.

This is why I don’t spend much time grieving over my loss.  

My hands still smell of chemicals, I am 36 images short, but tomorrow it will be forgotten and there will be new pictures to take.

The Pigeon and The Dove!

What is the difference between a pigeon and a dove? Biological it is not that different. In any encyclopedia you will get the word dove when looking up pigeon and the other way around.

However the way we look at the two birds is very different from each other.  

The Dove is perceived as something that resembles Peace, pureness and love. It is also the messenger. It spread its white wings and carries important letters from one country to another.  In a way it almost seams like a savior, and that is perhaps the reason why it is seen as an analogy for the Holy Spirit in Christianity.

The pigeon on the other hand is by the majority seen as the bird that is as close to a rodent as any bird can be. They live in the city and eat the food us humans leave behind. Often they are scruffy and lacking a crawl, and we consider them filthy and annoying.

In Danish language the two are not separated. They have the same name: due. The way we distinguish them from one another is by telling their place of habitat as a part of their name.  For example skovdue (forestdove) and bydue (citydove). We associate due with two different things just as in English speaking counties, and yet we have only one word for both.

A reason for the two different names in the English language is that they have their roots in different language families. The Dove (taube, duif) originates from the Germanic languages and the pigeon (pijon, pipion) originates from the romance languages, whereas Danish only have roots in the Germanic language.

So what is better?

Usually a word is invented because there is a need for it, because we are trying to define a subject within the frame of language. It would seem stupid to have to describe the bird every time we had to mention it, instead of giving it a name. And maybe it is not a bad idea to use two different names for what certainly has two different definitions, a negative and positive.

Just like “a little angel” and “a brat” are two different ways of describing a child.