“Survival games – vibrant landscapes and textile preparations” is an exploratory, nomadic, artistic process that deals with prepping, flow of information, landscapes and their contexts. Through time-limited stays at different places and in landscapes, we collect textile and sounds to create a collection of artworks and performances.
You Tube and its flow of prepper videos acts as a knowledge bank for textile techniques and prepping to the project. The information provides both a global perspective and survival knowledge. But it’s also difficult to interpret and of a questionable character. The digital stream talks about the future, doomsday prophecies, anxiety and how you survive through craftsmanship.
As artistic preppers, we seek support from the cooperative survival video game “Don’t Starve Together”. Our video game-based experience influences, in a humorous way, the project and provides ideas for objects, scenarios and themes that mixes with the influence of the landscape we are investigating.
The project raises questions about sustainability, reusing of old craft-based techiques and a humble approach to the earth. The artistic work has influenced our own visions of the future and concerns about climate change. You Tube and internet are complex sources that both conveys valuable knowledge but also distorts worldviews and makes navigation difficult.
When performing field recordings in the landscapes, we use both ordinary microphones and piezo elements to compose different soundscapes. The vibrations from the piezo elements are used in our performances as a ritualistic connection to the landscape. The piezo recordings ask questions about what is real through the skewed recording technique. What are they really recording? How does a landscape vibrate? How is information interpreted and what is distorted?
By staying in one place for a limited time, an extremely focused cutout of an otherwise endless process of time are generated. The cycle of the year and slow changes in climate are impossible to really perceive. But through these short glimpses, questions about what is real and how I do know it? – emerges, when landscapes almost never deliver what we expect.
This work was developed during the Residency Programe of AADK Spain, with funding from Konstnärsnämnden and with funding from Region Gävleborg.
