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eme emauto (2008)
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eme emauto (2008). Stillimage from video. Installation concisting of a projected videoloop, 30 min, and sound from three tracks in six speakers in a cinema/theater like room.
“For nothing can be itself and at the same time for itself but the two-in-one that Socrates discovered as the essence of thought and Plato translated into conceptual language as the soundless dialogue eme emauto -between me and myself. But again, it is not the thinking activity that constitutes the unity, unifies the two-in-one, on the contrary, the two-in-one become One again when the outside world intrudes upon the thinker and cuts short the thinking process. Then, when he is called by his name back into the world of appearances, where he is always One, it is as though the two into which the thinking process had split him clapped together again."
-Hannah Arendt ”The Life of the Mind”
eme emauto is an installation that I presented as my graduation show at KHM, the Malmö Art Academy’s gallery, in the spring of 2008. The installation consists of a large video projection and sound from three tracks in six loudspeakers, in a cinema/theater like room. In the video, we see the empty stage of a theater with it's subtitle display and the empty seats for the audience. The video was filmed at Malmö Opera and Music Theater.
The theater’s stage as well as the seats remain in this performance empty. Instead the subtitle display is at center stage (where translations of operas otherwise is shown), and unfolds a text written by me. The text moves it's subject with simple words, slowly with steady force, and the only sound that is heard is the sound of the empty theater.
In this work speech remains a script that is made to move itself and the only character at play, the viewer. Breaking with the convention of traditional narrative this text has neither an end, nor any beginning, but insists on a perpetual now, a present in which it continuingly holds the stage in silence.
Read the text in the video: eme emauto
Listen to the sound: the silence of the stage
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listeners (2008). Invitation card for eme emauto.
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