Annette Arlander

Professor, Head of Department of Research Development, Theatre Academy, Finland

Performing landscape – performing time?

How to perform landscape is the main theme and general research question of my artistic practice and my postdoctoral artistic research. The part of the project I would like to present could be called “the years”.

One of the ways I have tried to perform landscape is by documenting small performances in the same place on an island off Helsinki for one year at a time and creating video works (installations or screening versions) of them. I would like to present fragments of this series of years, which I have worked with since 2002 and named after the Chinese calendar: Year of the Horse (2002), Year of the Goat (2003), Year of the Monkey (2004), Year of the Rooster (2005), Year of the Dog (2006), Year of the Pig (2007) and year of the Rat (2008). Year of the Pig I am editing at the moment, it will be shown in August this year. Year of the Rat I am performing and video filming at present.

Year of the Rooster

Year of the Pig

My way of working consists of choosing a place on the island, a camera position, a scarf to wear and a position or action, and then repeating these approximately once a week for a year. When I started my main concern was to try to perform landscape without the human figure turning into the main thing. Soon I realised that besides the landscape and the changes in it, I am actually performing time. Besides the years I have also documented a day and a night with two hour intervals each year. This way of keeping other elements as constant as possible, in order to focus on changes in the landscape due to time, weather, seasons and traffic, I have used in other types of works as well. In this presentation I will focus on the years, however.

Issues to be raised

This mode of working minimizes the possibilities to aesthetic decisions, and thus to quality considerations after the initial choices are made. I try to repeat the same image regardless of circumstances and to keep the chronological order while editing. Is the quality of this type of work important and if so, at what point of the process – in the performances or actions, in the videos filmed and edited, in the installations or exhibitions or perhaps in the texts reflecting on the work? How to think of the quality of a performance anybody could execute, like sitting in a tree or lying on a cliff? Or the quality of a documentation with a camera on a tripod used with automatic functions? Is the long duration – the cycle of years – adding to the artistic quality? Or is it on the contrary diminishing it? Is commitment a value, or lack of willingness to change? How about new dimensions added over the years, like climate change?