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porträtt av ett träd, 1/9 2007
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portrait of a tree, 1 september 2007 (2007). Installation with projected video loop, 31,40 min, size of projection 20 x 15 cm. Stillimages from video.
On September 1st 2007, I got up early. It was five o'clock, and the sun hadn't appeared yet. The fog was thick, and the ground was steaming, but it looked like it would be a nice day, a sunny day. I put warm clothes on, made some sandwiches and a pot of coffee, filled my thermos and put it all in a backpack.
I picked up the backpack, videocamera and tripod, and went outside. The air was cold and fresh in that late summer way. I went through an enclosed bit of pasture with horses, through some brush and on to another enclosure. I had chosen a tree from there the day before. A wild apple tree by a cairn.
I don't know how many years old this tree is, but it has most likely been part of a number of stories, even if it has spent most of its time standing on its own.
My younger brother came here once when he was angry and upset, and sat down by the tree. He sat there for a while, and a hare moved up to him. Very close, right next to him. The angry and upset feeling went away and my brother went back home.
This morning, the tree wasn't alone, as I had expected. Several cows and calves, and a bull too, were standing there with a look of bemusement as I arrived. I had to find another cairn, get on top of it and place the camera and the tripod on it. When the sun slowly beganto rise I had done what I could to fix the settings, and the camera was in an interval mode where it shot half a second every thirty seconds.
The camera was in interval mode, shooting footage, all day long. I spent the day in the pasture myself, dozing in the sun a little further away, with the nosy cows close by. Once in a while I had to change the battery in the camera.
The result was a portrait of a day in the life of a tree. Small shifts in the light, small events, were magnified and made apparent. The filming technique created its own special rhythm, and I would later time the switches between the images to match the rate of a beating heart.
The tree in the center of the image. Constant and central. As I had imagined it before I did it, the tree was the main thing, but when I saw the result I noticed that there were many things around the tree that were just as important.
Other stories, other histories, all woven together. The way it really is.
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Read the text in swedish: porträtt av ett träd, 1/9 2007
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