Mellomteltet

Abstract

I happened to be living in a tent, simply in the lack of conventional living space. This initial experience of living in a tent in combination of proceeding life as usual provoked a distinct, yet ungraspable feeling of clarity in what used to be, but no longer felt like, reality. I started seeing myself as a researcher of this situation, balancing a continuous interchange between real life, reflective life, conceptual life and performed life. Whether this itself would make me an artist, a researcher or simply human, I could not be sure. Nevertheless, I believed this exploration and the material derived from it to have certain adoptability to a larger context, perhaps that of art and society, whatever art and society might consist of. Shortly after moving into a conventional household again I randomly came across the remains of a decomposed tent in the woods nearby. This tent had the very characteristics of my own tent and at the site were a variety of decayed objects and partly buried chattels. I regarded this residence as coherent of situational similarity to my own accommodation and chose to use this found material as a supplementary narrative in my research. The subject of interest was as of this moment my own experience combined with a reconstructing/deconstructing the experiences of this stranger. Our common being and doing were that of constant inbetweenness, what arose from this was an interest for the unreal, as the unknown yet to be known as unknown. As I would suggest such interest to be a primary source of artmaking, I saw this situational research as an artistic process led by performative and conceptual practice. By aesthetically contextualizing normative establishments from a position of inbetweenness, it could provide some potential ground for rearranging logic in our collectively opinioned everyday life. I see my research as picking up normative framings of the everyday and problematizing their tendency through a phenomenon of disenchantment in society and in the arts. Allowing an ontological uncertainty of the rational real and the irrational unreal to lead the research of phenomena, not opposing any of these logics, but creating a multi-conscious knowledge removed from loyalty within systems and replaced with a concept of becoming. This is instructed by a perspective of post-phenomenological situationism, which calls for an open empirical and theoretical distinction, not separating them but rather using them as producing each other mutually. My research is thus bound to a kind of liminal ground-zero in every layer of research, not only in its ontological, epistemological and methodical approach, but also in its discoursive mediation. This point of view shares some qualities from avantgarde movements of the sixties, though I use this connection in the context of our present time. The mediation materializes content between lived experience, experiential art and experimental text, where different modes of sensory, emotional and intellectual legibility is made accessible as tools of scientific awareness, but also as traces of what could further be actively experienced and conceptualized.