Falun, Sweden - August / September 2007

The reason why.

According to Ivan Ivanissevich – PhD in Philosophy specialized in Heidegger – there are stories/narratives that demand to be told, as if moved by an inner urgency. They search their way trough until they find their medium to emerge. In that way he interpreted our work Il Cadavere Squisito – The Lady in bread – for the Venice Biennial: The piece found the artists and not the other way around as we would like to believe.

into death so loved. seems to be one of those hypothetical narratives looking to be told.

It was, from the curator’s side, an explicit intention to expand the Falun’s Triennial outdoors, out of the show-room. There is a small river crossing the city of Falun and there is FA+, well known for its interventions in the urban space, using – among many other ingredients – text in their work; like in Strindberg’s quotations in a main street of Stockholm, Ibsen in Oslo or the ephemeral Kant on Water in Kaliningrad, formerly Königsberg.
It was an outspoken wish of the curator, who saw the last mentioned work and fell in love with it, to bring Falun’s river and FA+ together to give the Swedish spectators a chance to see that kind of work.
We doubted. We had a very strong conceptual reason as to why we used text made out of styrofoam in Kaliningrad’s river. She insisted, sweetly and kindly, several times until she convinced us and we agreed to use text on water. But it had to be different; we had to find the key, the connection. The reason why.

We knew very little about Falun but since the show was going to be in some month, and we had to finish 2, 3 works prior to this, we felt we didn’t have the necessary time to think or do any research, it had to wait.
Suddenly, late one night, wile working with another project with text (Ibsen in Oslo) an image came to me; I saw it clear in my head: Hair, blond hair floating on water. Like seaweed floats in the sea but it was blond hair forming letters but at the same time partly hiding the text that carries them.
We started to look for that hidden text.

There is no particular well-known author from Falun but the city is celebrated for its folk-song writers. We tried in the search engine: “Falun + river + folk-song”. I vomited in Falun’s river was the only concrete answer, hardly interesting neither poetic, a drunkard’s song. We extended the search to the region – Dalecarlia – and to the origin of the folk songs, the “skillingtryck” (penny-prints, songs commenting the news and what was going on in the villages around). An interesting word popped up: “Hårkullor” ( “Hair-ladies”). We followed that track instead.
Suddenly it became a matter of course to use hair, it belongs to the culture of the region, women culture, travelling women. There were hard times, hunger; people had to leave their home to survive, a tough challenge for everybody and for love. For those who stayed home and for those who went away.

Then, came the text.

In a dissertation (Anna Sparr, Lund University, 1997) about the hair-ladies handicraft there was an quotation from an 1830’s text as a – completely unsentimentally – testimony that hair jewellery could already be found back then. The forgotten officer and author Georg Adlesparre wrote in his Farewell words to life: Around my neck is placed the chain of hair that is made in memory of the one I loved the most, into death so loved.

The narrative found its way trough.