You know sometimes when you lie in bed just before sleep, or when you wake up in the middle of the night. I lie in a wooden covered bedroom, its feeling is close to a film set from Twin Peaks, but here I can see the back. I can go to the toilet. The work place is the home in a similar way as a theatre got a room for scenography production, costume, light, and props. It’s scale is its familiarity. I don’t wake up because of stress, anxiety or temperature change, just light, light sleep and the brain buzzz, buzz, buzz, close to gifted toxicity.
In order to go to school my grandma went on skies for a few kilometer with a sandwich in her pocket. Her mama, my great grandma would rather let her intestines crack than let us leave food on the table. Scope. Here comes potatoes. She grew up in an area where iron mills were common in the visual landscape which later on transformed into one of the countries larger military exports. My grandfather used to work there, hired as a welder.
There is a black and white photography of Signe, my great grandma in front of a red painted wooden bar in a fake fur leopard pattern winter coat. There is lots of snow on the ground. She is holding on to a handbag, wearing a white knitted hat. Someone got money! In the right front corner of the picture is a glimpse of a car in unknown color, but for sure branded as Volvo or SAAB. Her parents wasn’t farmers, but some sort of growth came along. Studies became possible when CSN was introudced. My great grandfather, Evert sat mostly in a rocking chair, next to his wood carvings figures, close to the balcony entrance in their apartment. I can’t remember what we spoke about but he enjoyed his garden, a lot. He expressed a desire to live through the millennia which he did with full on fireworks, I assume. Their daughter Siv, worked in the elderly care, told me stories about what they watched on the tellie. Her brother passed away due the effect long term use of alcohol have on the body, her sisters chew too many tablets and pills.
Lately, I mainly been reading literature. It is the only kind of text my brain can cope with and I can sense a textual body while reading in bed. My bed sheets are in colorful patterns. In Desperate Readings: Literature as Resistance and Reading as Ethics writer, Elisabeth Hjorth take an important position as a reader of novels to not necessary sense familiarity or recognition with characters instead the place of fiction becomes a place for subjectivities multitude, transformation and contradictions as a way to undo themselves outside of identity constructs bound to nation states, families and its political implications. For Hjorth says that the one who writes is not satisfied with the current state of affairs. The world as it is, a desire for change. For example, I cried while reading Caroline Ringskog Ferrada-Nolis’ Rich Boy, a novel evolving around three generations of women, a depiction of how relationship patterns, and its wounds are passed on through generations and depending on changes in society their emotional affects come out differently.
‘Det man inte vet om Lidingö är att det fanns pooler där på femtiotalet.’
When I was born five generations of women was alive. My mouth is open on the photo capturing this moment. My mama dreamed to work as a social welfare secretary and live in an apartment with living room window sills width enough so you can sit, and lean on it, while watching the city moving. Mama also worked in the elderly care for some years, and before that in a small correctional facility. My younger sister works as a social welfare secretary nowadays. I don’t think her window sills are wide enough to sit on, neither to lean on. Neither are the ones in the house of my other younger sister who are employed as a care taker and pedagogue in a small town communal kindergarten. But mine are. Temporary before the area are being teared down. She would probably say that the window sills are out of fashion but she tattooed my parents date of marriage on her upper arm for complete other reasons. How is a chain reaction chemical broken?
For their exhibition at Pracownia Portretu Gallery entitled Gift Economy show Falkeling will show a new series of works composed as sculptural assemblages patch together through cross-stitches, welds, screws, hems, and tape. Gift Economy refer to Havamal, one of the oldest poems in the Scandinavian (Icelandic) Edda where presents and gift are being introduced sidelong some sort of friendship, male bounding and trust becomes a social contract that shapes societies ground. Lauren Berlant, a professor in English at the University of Chicago in Cruel Optimism that Western societies still seem to promise something to hold on to. But what if these attachments and its relationships in itself are unhealthy, rather take you further away from the object of desire rather than get you closer, like a circular detour. Berlant thinksgs in ellipses rather than timelines. Received gifts might be more toxic than they first appear, a roof, a balcony, a jacket or a hug. If the ultimate gift of generosity is unknown; can you trace it?
Imprint
| Artist | Angelica Falkeling |
| Exhibition | Gift Economy |
| Place / venue | Pracownia Portretu, Łódź |
| Dates | 23 March - 13 April 2019 |
| Website | www.pracowniaportretu.com |
| Index | Angelica Falkeling Pracownia Portretu |