WHITE-OUT
Between Telling and Listening, Historiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, 2002
2 videos 40 minutes each,
7 diasec photographs 80 x 120 cm
6 texts on aluminium 120 x150 cm.This work expresses my desire to know how two peoples, Sámi and Swedish, sharing one land can inspire each other.
A text component of the project that draws from numerous sources: from historical, archival, fictional and travel literatures, and from popular newspapers and magazines, from both Sámi and Swedish sources. It suggests the possibility of an unending discussion, a continual discourse, an infinite circle of telling and listening.
The project's portrait subject is encountered in two projected loops involving two locations, which represent a duality that she herself embodies. Asa Simma is both a Sámi and a Swede. Filmed in Asa Simma's apartment in Stockholm, one loop documents her reaction to the project's text component, which has been presented for her response. In the other loop, filmed in her place of origin in the far north of Sweden, in Lapland, she listens to what she had said earlier in Stockholm in response to the text. In the installation at the Museum of History in Stockholm, the two video loops are presented as facing projections, showing Asa Simma talking on one side, and listening to herself on the other. The text compilation to which she responds is presented on a nearby wall as well seven digitally altered photographs depicting the collections of the Museum itself.
Asa Simma telling Asa Simma listening
View of the installation White Out
© All images and content are copyright Esther Shalev-Gerz except otherwise noted.