After a nutritious meal, we sit together for the first part of the afternoon program delivered by Liz McTernan. In the living room, a large print of a work by Olafur shows a daunting underground landscape. On the cold tiled floor, we take a moment to digest/listen again to the latest essay by Liz: “Cosa Bella Mortal: A Work of Friction.” The piece is one of the three official artwork produced by the project. One can scroll through it and its lavish digital layout on the EER website. She reads a selection of excerpts, relating to tribology, the science of friction, and her experimentations of heaps and heaping. The essay is also a way to process the feeling of loss after the recent death of her twin sister, who suffered from a degenerative condition. The existential tone of the work plays neatly together with her quasi-ethnographic descriptions of the meticulosity of measurement science, and the way scientists care for the precise weight of dead and lively things through the preservation of immortal references in heavily guarded graves.
After that moment of intensive word instillations, we unfold again our limbs and senses, heading back to the garden for the heaping exercise. The EER team has sourced several materials which will be heaped, among them sand, gravel, soil, bark, rice, and lichen from a previous show of Olafur’s, which Liz transported from Berlin in huge and heavy luggage. The experimental process is conducted by Liz, with the help of participants. She brings our awareness to the moment in which the material on the floor becomes a heap. Is the “heaping” moment subjective, and in which way? How do different materials “heap” in different ways? In a flash, I imagine and feel with my mind’s eye as if grasping the material (my mind’s hands) and feel the difference between the non-heap and the heap to be a matter of graspability.
Heaps are difficult to sketch. To document the process, I take pictures and I realize that most nascent heaps are flat on photographs – or when I close one eye. Heapness is another matter of perspective.
The final objectifying measurement is provided by Liz with a homemade wooden instrument to assess the angle of the heap. It’s all about the friction of the material on itself, she explains.
Dorte picks some lichen to become a lichen heap herself. I help to cover the rest of her body, assisting the process and closely attending to the moment when Dorte becomes a living heap. The lichen seems to provide a living shelter from the sun, a second skin peeling off and vibrating as she breathes. Prompted by Andrea (or Olafur?), Dorte gives the heap life for a few moments before shaking it off completely, giving the heaping exercise a finale libendis –free from the instruction yet prolongation it in a lively manner.
A short coffee break was much welcome, getting some rest in the shade was necessary. Pireeni Sundaralingam invites us then to two exercises. The first is reminiscent of the mapping, as she asks us to come up with our “second or third” favorite thing in the garden and spend a bit of time experiencing it. Showing the divergence of our attentions and phenomenological makeup, she demonstrated with this simple score the diversity of our ways of encountering the world. Andreas and I shared our perspectives on the garden, on remnants of toys laying around and trees growing straight against the will of the (mad) gardener.
For the second exercise, Pireeni gave us a simple set of instructions: “let’s move like mycelium.” The score consisted in a sequence: one participant would point the finger across the circle to someone else, saying “you.” The designated person then says “Yes!” and would point their own finger to someone else, before moving in that direction (when the next person says “yes”), freeing a slot in the circle for the first participant to take place. We started moving without thinking. Then things got complicated, as new ideas came up which made the game more chaotic and stressful: when two of these chains of action unfold in the same time, it becomes difficult to designate someone because the attention of the group is split. I experienced a proper jam in my nervous system at that point. Dorte intervened to suggest a cure for the score: no speaking, and bring hands to heart to receive and reiterate the invitation. The soft feeling of that last sequence felt like a balm after the previous overclocking.
Olafur is also a musician: he invited his guitar teacher to play live for the evening. XX comes with his slide guitar and a few pedals, delivering smooth slabs of sound. Olafur plays softly on his telecaster. “Do you play?” He transfers it to my hands: “Don’t make it stop”... “very softly.” Such a fine guitar… “Do you know that brand?” That’s an excellent instrument indeed. Most participants are in the kitchen, or eating and chatting by the sunny side of the house. The fusion kitchen surprises us with baklava-looking appetizers filled with truffle cheese cream. The arched terrasse is perfect for some improvised singing, with the vines taking over. Karsten listens intently, he will pick the guitar and play a few chords later on. Dorte darts with her resonating voice a few staccatos, racing with the guitar. Helene also joins for a while, reading lyrics of a pop song with Dorte on their phones, before Amy takes over and for a while.
The sponge cake is heavenly.
Experiencing: After a good night of rest and some smoked salmon for breakfast at the very smart Citizen M hotel, we take a cab for the second and last day of the workshop. Asaf introduces us to the exercise: we will do a stretching dance around a colorful piece of fabric, moving from image to figuration, to con-figurations (Donna Haraway is often a word away). The figure keeps something of the motion of its making within it. We happily gather in groups of six, catch the cloth and start moving around on the grass, propelled by fresh coffee and morning sun.
Then he invites us to drop the piece of fabric: “while keeping it in your hands.” With “no pantomime.” “Keep moving!”
It works like magic: the stretchy feeling sticks with us. I feel it in my hands and in my arms (I still can as I write these lines). We feel it in the way we move together. I am – we are – engulfed with that feeling and its inherent movement.
Experimenting: Asaf invites the ghost inside the house. We open an online document, and describe/transcribe together the movement of one of the group, invited to play further in the middle. The stretchy spirit is strong, it animates and pushes and pulls bodies and words into twirls. We “contact” with it, and even in the small space of this living room, the members of the group come into motion and work with ease.
Reflecting: the ghost did stick with us. What was really impressive was that stubborn stickiness of the movement imprinted by the cloth on our individual and group dynamic. I report about a moment of folding of our pinkish cloth, it started looking like a vulva and a womb, delicate and enveloping. This feeling of envelopment/enveloping was transduced into enveloping and caressing gestures. Asaf passes around his phone to transcribe our conversation. What a deep experience, and what a friendly moment: making company at its peak.
After a short break, Amy introduces us to her workshop, which concludes the two-day program. It relies on the active engagement of “people formerly known as the audience” to re-imagine a cinema of the apocalyptic future. With a seemingly endless stream of AI-generated pictures, she floods us visually and imaginatively with the concept of a “live cinema” of the coming downfall of our reality.
Quoting a paper from chemist Ian Cousins, she places her work “Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary,” as she shares with us a vision of what she calls an “anthropocenema.” Bringing the audience into motion, she prompts us to generate new images relating to EER workstreams. Anna, Helene and I play around, watching the results in HD on the big monitor. We invite MidJourney to a dance party with long-dead abstract painters. They contribute to our reflection on the future of cinema at the end of the world. Anna brings one of her all-time favorites on board: “A dance in the style of Louise Bourgeois” triggered the algorithm to display for us the photographic documentation of a choreography of middle-aged people in tutus, circling a monstrous pink octopus – the AI somehow percolated that dimension of Louise Bourgeois works which relates to the aftermath of the masquerade.
Sitting on the plane, I sketch the final moment of the workshop: an invigorating sea bath at Hellrund beach with fellow EER people, another of many peaks into a companying process that has become a robust mountain range. Enjoying a beer or a coke zero with colorful snacks on a bed of dried seaweed, we chat away for half an hour, happy about the unstructured moment after two very full days, thankful for the unusual summerly temperature, grateful to Sophie and Anna, who have stayed at the house to tidy up. Joe has a giant hat, which makes him look like a curious mushroom. We discuss snacks. Then we walk back “home,” pick our bags, and embark on cabs and planes, with a bit of sand in our shoes and expanded horizons for our practices.
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