Night Writing
 

The following conversation took place as a chat on the Net in October. Each of us was in her own flat somewhere in Copenhagen. The agreement was that we were to start at midnight, otherwise nothing was planned or prepared. The dialogue was simply to be allowed to unfold at random in the darkness of the night while most other people lay asleep.

Henriette Heise: Are you awake?

Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen: Yes, but I must admit that I’m pretty tired – my eyelids are heavy and hot and I feel drowsy and a bit muzzy in the head. What about you?

HH: I’m tired too, I fell asleep and half-dreamed I was reaching for a piece of fabric to feel it.

KBR: Actually I thought I’d sleep a little too, but was afraid I’d fall into too deep a sleep. Now I regret it all the same... But you slept a little and managed to half-dream? What was the bit of fabric you were touching?

HH: This particular piece of fabric in the dream had no function – I just had to touch it. Yes, and then I woke up and thought that I didn’t know what I should say, and that I felt like falling back into the darkness. But this is a good time – this is when, despite my tiredness, I can convince myself that I have an endless amount of time ahead of me.

KBR: It’s a long time since I’ve had to do anything at all constructive so late. When I was younger and a student, the nighttime hours were the most productive. It was as if I could gather my thoughts better when the surroundings went to sleep and the darkness fell – that’s when this dense, intense space arose around me that meant I could become one with the work in front of me.

HH: But the good thing about night is maybe that you don’t need to do anything con-struc-tive ... ?

KBR: Yes, you’re right about that, but that feeling can be hard to shake off, I find. It’s actually only when I lay my head on the pillow in the evening and pull the duvet up around me that the feeling of having to spend my time sensibly or constructively completely leaves my body – it only happens as I close my eyes, let go and allow myself to float away.

HH: Night and sleep are mostly presented as something where you have to charge yourself up so you can function the next day. Well, I don’t want to speak for the whole of humanity, but for me night always means a chance to disappear. Especially into deep sleep where there are no dreams. No pictures, that is.

KBR: This talk about sleep and dreams makes me think of your ‘dream curtains’, which consist of a patchwork of old duvet covers, each circle decorated with a throng of flowers, dots, geometrical patterns, gently colourful in their subdued, washed-out colours. With these seductive dream curtains – illuminated by a slowly panning source of light whose slow-pulsing tempo rather resembles breathing – you draw attention to this very state just before you fall asleep or wake up. What is it about this state that interests you?

HH: Softness, surrender, submission – a state where there’s a kind of openness to other images, new patterns and structures. The title of the curtains is a quote from Louise Bourgeois: “Dreaming softens you and makes you unfit for daily work”. In other words we’re in a place where ordinary common sense no longer functions.

KBR: In several of your pieces you work to create a different space from rational everyday space – a space where time-wasting, inefficiency, daydreams, night dreams function as a reaction against the ruling ideology’s focus on efficiency and normalization. You’ve spoken several times about the necessity of insisting on the position of the fragile, and on the almost wordless, on the importance of trying to find a way to another language than the language of power that simply reproduces existing, pre-constructed ideas and images. In your works you open up paths for the disregarded, the marginalized, what can’t be tamed or controlled, what pricks holes in the rational or makes scratches in the normally so smooth and perfect surfaces of daily life. What can inefficiency and time-wasting be used for?

HH: In all modesty, I want to help to expand the universe. I’m afraid that efficiency simply confirms and repeats certain images. Can we find any other images, any other possibilities? On the other hand there’s also a dark side to it all – where it’s only about escaping, or imploding, switching off all the lights.

KBR: So, like the dream that can suddenly turn into a nightmare, inefficiency can have a dark and destructive character?

HH: Yes, there isn’t necessarily any guarantee that inefficiency can be used for something sensible – so that everyone’s happy in the end. We can’t get away from the destructive, anything else would be a lie. And that is where the darkness machines come in.

KBR: Tell me a little about them. There’s something both troubling and seductive about them at the same time, I think. They seem like holes that could potentially swallow you up...

HH: The darkness machines function in two ways: one is their physical presence, as I have constructed them, where they do what they’re supposed to – they produce darkness. The other way is in your idea of what a darkness machine does. And yes, I think they take us to a place on the borderline between submission and perdition. I’d like to take us into the darkness where the sense of vision no longer rules. And then when it’s dark, we can begin to imagine some new images ... That’s what I believe some-times.

KBR: At Overgaden the darkness machines are hung up in front of the windows in the back space along with among other things the work Night Writing, which refers to an early form of braille – a tactile symbol system. When I sit here imagining how it will feel to move further and further into the exhibition, I imagine one will get the sense of moving further and further into a deep, dark pocket. Tell me a little about your own conception of the experience and the motion through the spaces.

HH: In my thoughts I’ve moved around in these spaces for hours, for days; and yes, I’ve thought of a process going from the first space to the space farthest back, and then back again. There are different states where vision and the imagination have changing roles.

KBR: Could one say that the exhibition also becomes an image of the phases of sleep, in the sense that we are slowly sucked into the darkness, where at one and the same time we disappear and become present again?

HH: No, in fact I can’t say that. Its more like an exploration of our imaginary visual world. And for that reason it isn’t sufficient just to grasp at the dream images of sleep, when there are also daydreams that are woven together with all the other imagined pictures that flow through us in the course of a quite ordinary day. It’s these imaginary pictures that sometimes make our world hang together, but which also offer an escape from an unbearable reality, hold us back in our fear, or can help us forward to new possibilities.

KBR: And why is the exhibition called There are pockets, she said?

HH: The title comes from a letter I once read a long time ago in an English newspaper. The letter was about a woman who was trying to survive great grief. The man who wrote the letter repeated what she had once said to him: “There are pockets,” she said. “Pockets of time when I can bear it. Watching television for a little while or a conversation. The rest of the time is madness.”

KBR: When I think about the wall-sized images of pockets and drawers, in some way they take on the character of that kind of temporary pocket of time, a space where you can hide for a while, a place where you can shut the world out and find peace to process the painful events that everyday life inevitably offers. Do the pockets and the drawers have a little of the same function as curtains?

HH: The large pictures of pockets and drawers are what is called photo wallpaper. When I was a child it was smart to have a whole wall covered with photo wallpaper showing a beech wood. It has always fascinated me that you can add a forest to a small room, for example in a two-room flat on the fourth floor. The curtains function in a different way ... It may well be that I’m too tired now, but I don’t quite see the connection?

KBR: I’m thinking that the drawers and the pockets, like the curtains, both conceal and reveal, and point to the boundary between private and public space. Opening other people’s drawers or looking through their pockets is a bit like trying to look through your neighbour’s curtain to see what she/he is doing – an attempt to transgress into the intimate sphere.

HH: Yes, and unfortunately the possibilities for that kind of transgression are limited if you want to behave fairly reasonably, so we have to use our imagination and imagine what goes on behind the curtains.

KBR: Could one say that in your works you try to redirect our gaze and our way of defining things and thus placing them in pre-defined boxes that make us believe that the world hangs together in a particular way?

HH: Yes, you could say that. But on the other hand I’m not on any didactic mission – my dream is more about achieving constant motion.

KBR: Tell me a little about your works with lens flares and the relationship between these ephemeral light-reflections and the imaginary.

HH: I’m interested in how a lens flare arises: the way it’s a product of a source of light from the out-side and the nature of the camera lens. Just as our imaginary pictures are formed by an interplay between something from the outside and the individual person’s mental structure. I am attracted by the beautiful, abstract geometrical figures that appear, and as part of an attempt to understand I draw these non-physical figures over into certain media that are highly tactile: linocuts, drawings and felt collages. I always have to touch something to get closer to understanding it.

KBR: At first glance it can be hard to decode what it is that is depicted, but that’s where the titles help you on your way. At first they just look like abstract forms or patterns, a little like the big silhouette pictures that are also in the exhibition.

HH: Yes, they look abstract, but they are figurative depictions of lens flares from photographs and films. And the silhouettes, they’re figurative too, but look abstract. What they depict, the viewer has to work out .... There aren’t so many words left tonight, and I’m very tired now ... Shall we say it’s bedtime?

KBR: Yes, let’s. Actually I think it’ll be a bit difficult to fall asleep now ...

HH: Sleep well.

2010