“voice under” at Accelerator invites visitors to a performative film screening led by Bergsmark herself. The screening is divided into different elements consisting of moving images, a somatic exercise and a board game.
Emerging from Bergsmark’s long experience as a filmmaker, “voice under” has developed from the endeavour to expand the fixed character of the film medium; in time, materiality, narrative structures and viewer position. Through the screening, Bergsmark invites the audience to step out of the conventional passive audience position of moving image and to experience film through a broad sensory register. The title of the work refers to the artist’s desire to explore and listen to the diversity of parallel voices beyond or alongside the omniscient voice over of film. The artist wants to investigate the subversive potential of the film medium through a body of work that incorporates uncertainty, mobility and porous narratives.
“voice under” at Accelerator takes place in an installation divided into two spaces in which two films are presented. The first dark enclosing space presents a film in which several bodies have come together into one. A body is gendered primarily through face, voice and front. In this film, the focus is on the back and the spine. There is a duality and ambivalence in the gesture of turning your back on someone—it can be out of arrogance as well as fear. To turn away from a potential threat is both to put oneself in a vulnerable position but can also be a strategic act of self-preservation. The making of the sound and choreography have been informed by acts of listening to the resonances of a past in deep time before the emergence of vertebrates. Jellyfish are a species seemingly far removed from humans, but there are similarities in our nervous systems that are triggered by danger. Is it possible to experience traces in your own body from a time before minerals came together to form bones?
Parts of Bergsmark’s process are initiated by an intuitive prompt in situations where states of heightened attention and intimate presence can occur. The artist has a large archive of film and physical material collected in such moments. The second space is installed as an arcade for board games. Along the walls, materials and objects from this personal archive are lined up. These objects functions as the pieces of the board game. The film shown here contains several clips from the archive, together with fragments from other own ongoing film productions and found archive footage.
Both films are guided by the idea of the different layers of time we harbour in our bodies. Bergsmark draws parallels between how memories are situated in the body and the conventions of the film medium:
“Just like a film where the recording remains unchanged, trauma is also a time capsule that can take a static form in one’s memory, it is repeated and formulated in the same way over and over again.”
She is driven by the desire to explore how desire, joy and liberation can be a generating principle—in terms of inner, outer and collective change. Traumaturgy is a term Bergsmark has given her quest of developing dramaturgies with the capacity to depict the vulnerability of queer and trans people, without the fixation on humiliation or trauma. Instead, the aim is to approach the potential of vulnerability and uncertainty as liberating, transformative and pleasurable.
The screening at Accelerator begins with a moment of shared silence. Bergsmark is interested in neurological functions and how various methods for trauma treatment departs from the autonomic nervous system and its regulations of activity and tranquility. A governing idea is that a seemingly passive body can be the expression of an active act of resistance. A central part of both the process and the work presented at Accelerator is the element of play and games. This part of voice under resembles a board game but is primarily structured around the elements that define play: the absence of goals objectives and winners. In some social interactions—such as engaging in play and games—the autonomic nervous system can generate the bodily responses that are a prerequisite for curiosity.
at Accelerator, Stockholm University
until April 14, 2024