To Begin with Absence (field notes)

Field notes from various locations

1st sitting (Refshaleøen, 9th of Jan. 2025)
#note 1
What is the vision? What is the exchange? Where are we going? The idea of working formulaically causes hesitation.
Braiding fingers, braiding grass, braiding bridges, braiding roots, braiding dresses, braiding hair, braiding attitudes, braiding relationships, braiding generations.

#note 2
Held space / pot / uterus / foxholes
Double landscape
Softness
Enclosed
Layers of sound enter through the pores
A layer of soft pillows elevating body and head up and out of the surrounding grass that legs and hips grow into
Embodied listening to the place, taking in and flowing out through all the self
quieting of brain activity to be able to be present
dialogue through skin
smells, through the ear
from the innermost layer of flesh, fluids, membrane
sitting on Mother Earth, the spine growing through her surface
lmpaled and connected through the anus

2nd sitting (Vordingborg - opposite the train st, 13th of Jan. 2025)
#note 1
Knotted. You spit me out. Repulse me. Everything is way too much. You turn yourself inside out. You show me the booty. The dividend. I don’t dare to leave. I’m freezing to the bone. You overwhelm me. Watch out! It’s impossible to go below the surface. I’m skating on the top. On the ice. Gargling. A deep hum and the air gets stuck in my throat. I sense a threat. I become uncertain and turn around. I spot a woman who sneers at me. She gestures frantically in the air. Another woman looks me straight in the eye. Her alien ice-blue eyes. Could it be red? Red pupils. Red as the lap, or red as the anger. Her face painted in fiery colors. You hardly see who she is. A mask. An Eastern spirit. She knows the way. She knows where we’re going. She doesn’t flinch. She never turns around. “Do you trust me?”

#note 2
I can’t find rest
The blood pumps through my body
I’m kissing someone and a thick substance flows into my mouth
All the city sounds are so present
It’s too hectic. I can’t let myself be embraced and fall asleep
Then it happens. The sounds become background, the body sinks in
sleeping bodies in the middle of the city
We are all so tired, exhausted, why aren’t more people lying down?
Sleeping bodies in the dump of the city
We are trash
Passersby becomes an inserted soundtrack between the buzz of the city and my inner universe.

3rd sitting (Refshaleøen, 16th of Jan. 2025)
#note 1
Something large moves smoothly under my right elbow. It's layered with itself. Adjusts its body under the weight of my arm. I put it off. Reducing it to a mere product of my imagination. It continues to slither and I am immediately torn from my dream. Twisting. Invertebrate.

I hear wind turbines everywhere. Eagerly awaiting. Now, I see big funnel instruments that catch the wind and create whistling sequences. A beetle burrowing under my hood. Who am I? Who am I? I dream of a fox sniffling my ear, and I wake up startled. My shock causes the fox to bite me in a sort of defensive attack. Sometimes attacks are caused by fear of being attacked. Blood in the bidet, blood in the lap.

#note 2
Landscape of clones
Doubled landscapes
Everyone sitting in the same way, in a kind of chair, facing the same direction
Song work
A big unison work
- audio recording -
Freezes in time
We are the only ones
Sculptures on the planet
Moving on all 4 along the paths in the landscape

Writhing out
Insect nest

Ambient tone drowns out everything
Crills in the shoulder blade joint
Ligaments that want to be stretched out

- audio recording -

I want my body back

You see the image and you are the image
Through body positions, you gain access to other perceptions

We are a sea of ​​bodies

4th sitting (Refshaleøen, 17th of Jan. 2025)
#note 1
I often feel like I am being hunted. I dream of a day when the sun is shining, and you’re wearing shorts - we’re walking along the edges of the location. Along the fence, along the edges of the lawn. Around and around. In silence. I’m arriving. I put a mark in my notebook. It marks the minute the feeling of being chased disappeared and emptiness took over. We walk, and we walk around and around, saying nothing to each other. It was an agreement we made in advance, walking in silence.

Mule - who am I in this soft bed of grass? I miss that summer day even though it hasn’t happened yet. Right now, there is nothing else to do but to shout the rage out of my body. The anxiety. Bark like a rabies-infected, psychotic dog. Like in Danish theater when all the lines are shouted out, and like those people who write in capital letters when they text-message their friends. Gastric dilation. Strategic thinking causes me heartache. The horizon swallows my tenacity. I eat things like a pic.

Sometimes, I miss the theater. But only because I have a desire to isolate things. Separate what is possible with landscapes and those draining demands of production that inevitably shape the possibilities in the theatre. Two rooms. I want to control what seeps through the borders. Keep the clutter away.

#note 2
Drone
Grayish whiteness
Surfaces
Waves
A practice that wanders around the same place
Becoming a dance, is a dance
A circle
A picture
A part
Together
A vegetation wall
Something that unfolds on the other side
Here everything is almost still
Smells, sounds, buildings, laughter, witnesses of invisible sceneries
I find myself on the other side
Kept out and squeezed in
Pressed against the green fence of artificial islands that pushes the sea
3 stones. 3 krah krah krah

5th sitting (Oringe - the wetlands, 20th of Jan. 2025)
#note 1
Wandering. Where the goal is not the final destination but the meetings that occur along the way. Wings beat the water as the birds take off. The kind of walking that puts us in touch with an ancient human condition, a knowing, a pace, a sense of time that all humans have known through time. An inner compass. An inner metronome. Fates on the road. The life that you pass. On location, we form a circle. At a distance as well as up close. Rumi suggests that intimacy entails being so close to someone that we may appear distant. Finding home through walking? Finding intimacy through hiking?"

#note 2
A scent of something still
Here it is always summer
Cowbells passing, calling, reminding you
Scenes move past, in and out of sight
A place to rest, dream, smell, lay down, between decomposing pumpkins and shit, broken glass, crows, reeds, on the water's surface
The musician on his string instrument surrounded by the industrial drone
The birds' communication, the chatter, the voices reaching out from the allotments
The new kitchens headquarter looms in the periphery

people in waders
on small festival chairs
in deck chairs
with bird's-eye views
folk dance
songs of magic
Burning sage

Learn the name of everything that surrounds you

6th sitting (Refshaleøen, 24th of Jan. 2025)

# note1
My restlessness is almost deafening. The drones whisper their song. A bed opens up in the middle of the grass, and it seems irrational not to stop here when the land offers itself so openly. Why should I resist this hospitality? There is shelter down here. Above me, seagulls are throwing themselves against the wind. Something is asleep and something is resisting the urge to drop. Fights without a cause. Breathing is heavy. Saliva drips from the corner of my mouth. A strange song without a melody. I need to move. To trot the mess out of my head. A trail so long that it blends with its surroundings. The weight on her shoulders when she walks. It draws the landscape and leaves soft folds. Courage grows from her skin. She is a layer in the land. Close and unapproachable at the same time. Like Rumi says: “So out in the open I appear hidden”.

#note2
Between the stone, the grass, the rain, and the weight of my own body, my arm sleeps
The cold penetrates the resting body. The stone is suddenly warm
Smoke pours out. From the chimney and from the mouth
Who is it that moves inside me
Wet pages
Protected by my Goretex lookalike white eco-feminist artist suit
Work clothes.
I also fit in on the other side of the hedge
This is also a dump