Warm Little Pond

For our second exhibition Sans Souci invited the independent exhibition space Salon 75 to collaborate on creating an event that caters performative practices of all kind. The performances were spread out on different locations, carrousels, stages and bars at the worlds oldest amusement park Dyrehavsbakken.

Exhibition text

At Bakken things move on tracks. Bodies are flung out over the cliff’s edge and then caught again, cheering, it’s an event with a clear beginning and end. Home, away, home again. It’s real, these are actual physical forces, you’re falling. But the passenger, the viewer, is put out of action, a passive body moved by this narrative that closes on itself. The amusement ride is a fiction in a sense, but it’s not making images, not primarily. This world outlined by glass fibre sculptures, nosedives and wooden constructs doesn't aim to envelop you, to conjure, to go beyond its own confines. The whole curve is given away already before you start, it contains no before and no after. Still it whirls up as a fragile composition, a cosmos clinging things together that then fall back apart as it ends. A narrative is something you choose, an arbitrary distinction of a continuous real. An image can be left unread halfway through, a sentence can lose its meaning before its conclusion, but on a rollercoaster you’re strapped in so you don’t fall off.

It’s important to have an ending. The narrative with no end would mime a biology of sorts. Strings of molecular information float around in a primordial soup until they tie themselves into knots, and the knots make it possible to trace their own image, in reproductions, a tale told in loops. In the retelling there is a splitting, which becomes a multiplicity, until it being the same story again and again doesn’t matter. And until each part is so different from each other that they can merge into new wholes.

The body on the stage is actually there. Pjerrot sometimes appears in Tivoli and at Bakken at the same time. Like most things, Pjerrot is an image that has to be redrawn, as a series of intentional moves. Staged. Here, the body is formed by the narrative too, but now to say, not to see. The interval of performance is the deliberate movement of body through time. Maybe the rollercoaster actually is a rollercoaster. An experience that doesn’t remove you, but just moves, throws, shifts the seeing body. It’s not an image, it’s a show, it depicts here and now. The performer can move themselves without drawing an image of Pjerrot. The viewer in the audience is really there, and watch along as they throw themselves around, stringing together meaning and tying it into knots. A mess of signs and readings and stillness and noise that probably just wants to set things in motion. There is no ‘one more go’, we can’t begin again at the end. When things have moved around, we have to start somewhere else.

Fritjof Krabbe Nørretranders