T E X T

Catalogue text written for Carolina Jonsson´s video installation and photographic work "Holograms of Ecolonia". Click on the link below to read the text in full and visit the artist´s website:
http://carolinajonsson.com/Holograms_of_Ecolonia_text.htm

Paradigm, Documenting Bodies: Epikris, First Man Must Not Fall! are all works from 2010 presented at the exhibition SURFACE MATTERS Belay your partner at Rotor Gallery in Gothenburg.

In the different versions of the work Documenting Bodies I activated a paper that ordinarily surfaces as exam table paper. The thin but yet hard-wearing paper constitutes the film between body and world. The process of writing the rolls was documented in video format and became yet another record of the story, inscribed in the writer´s - my own - body.

Documenting Bodies, documenting, video 9 min, video/editing: Annika Koldenius

Paradigm

Sound installation comprising four speakers and four audio track simulataneously playing. Photo: Hans-Ove Rydberg, Giorgi Makhniashvili

First Man Must Not Fall!/Förstemannen får inte falla!

In this text and mixed media installation medical documents – case records – were interwoven with parts of a voice-over from the feature film The Beckoning Silence written by Joe Simpson. The story is a recount of a team of mountaineers that at the very same time the patient records came into existence (in the nineteen thirties) set out to conquer the north face of the unclimbed mountain Eiger in Switzerland. Their quest failed due to a fatal error in belaying: the climbers forgot to leave the rope across an icy part of the mountain´s face. On their way back they could not traverse it. The fragments from the medical notes showed different courses of events in terminal illness of patients at Sahlgrenska Sjukhuset in Gothenburg.

The installation as a whole consisted of nine framed texts that together made up the narrative, (of which one is present above). As this work was performed in Swedish, a brief excerpt from The Beckoning Silence is enclosed below:

To come across, the climber had his rope running underneath him under tension, and he could have lent, with his friends tensioning him across this blank bed, and then they pulled their ropes back. When they came back they could not get any tension, they did not have any high pit above them.
Everything you could press, into a small minuet to climb. Every fiber in your body would be concentrating on every tiny move. This is their best climber, trying for all he was worth to get back across the very thing that he had so critically unlocked.
And later. There is that moment, when activity stops. You just know you cant do this. And you have to accept, that it is over. And it would have gradually been dawning on all of them, that this could be a fatal error, they had not left the rope across.




Photo: Giorgi Makhniashvili

Documenting Bodies: Epikris

"Documenting Bodies: Epikris" was the second part of a project I started in 2010. In this mixed media installation I adapted medical files that were no longer classified. I intertwined them with data from scientific research papers, my own medical entries and fictional accounts, and then rendered the hybrid texts by hand on hygien paper used for covering stretchers and medical exam tables. The process of writing the rolls was documented on video and became yet another record of the work´s story. An edition of an artist book, that contained the text in its entirety, was also made.

Photo: Giorgi Makhniashvili


Documenting Bodies: Epikris, Artist book

Master graduate show, Göteborgs Konsthall

DOING TREATMENT: DOCUMENTING BODIES, ink on hygiene paper, 300 X 60 cm.