Building upon Ruins – Interweaving Metaphors

Joanna Magierecka

Does the complexity of a work of art, composed of diverging narratives, present a possibility to connect to what we do not grasp? In this exposition I present interweaving as a compositional technique and dramaturgical strategy, through aspects of the creative process connected to and elements of three installations – part of a series called Ruins. The installations combine different aspects of storytelling, participatory strategies, media, and forms of expression. I believe that interweaving different and diverging fragments, allowing audience members to create their own performance dramaturgy and experience, can create an understanding of others and their experience. In that lies the possibility for a shared story – a collective story. Interweaving as a method is also present in the dramaturgy of the text itself – building up to an audio-visual representation of those elements and the written text. In this way, I hope the exposition lets the reader and me both investigate interweaving as a technique and experience it.

Underneath is an example of the text interwoven:

there is always a forest. is there not? always a forest we used to play in. explore. run around in. hide in. disappear in. children always roam in the forests nearby. we did. did we not? you would run ahead. and I would follow. to the shooting range, really!! a shooting range, do you not remember?

I am the packed lunch of a Russian prisoner. He died here, at Bragdøy. He was shot dead by the German commandants for stealing food. He was hungry.

Did you know that the polish grandmother Josefa Maigerecka is the sole survivor of the Pogrom in Ukraine? Her whole family burned inside a church.

Summer Place and Bragdøya united, just like so much else of the family stood for romantic nature, experience and enlightenment work. It is not hard to find in many of Nicolais ideals of Henrikopedien (textbook education of male children) in life Bragdøya. (The last passage was on purpose Google translated without correction).

Interweaving - Ruins Bragdøya

In the following text, I use different font colours to highlight the way I recycle the material, interweaving it with new content throughout the series of installations. A new colour represents new material; the same colour used twice or more represents recycling. The coloured text may also lead to another expression that progresses throughout this essay. My research into site-specific material at Bragdøya (KIK conference) led me to two divergent storylines, from different historical periods, that complement each other:

Enlightenment and warfare

The age of Enlightenment: Henrik Arnold Thaulow, the grandfather of Henrik Wergeland and Camilla Collett, had a summerhouse at Bragdøy.

A World War II prisoner camp at Bragdøy, for Russian soldiers captured by Germans.

I also used written texts relating to my own life as a part of the installations:

'Ruins of Childhood', which in one way or another became one of the basic elements of each installation.

'My Grandmother' and her life story as the sole survivor of her whole family after World War II. This story related to the site-specific stories and became one of the basic elements of the installation.

This part of my work with the installation was merely at the research stage; the physical manifestation could be described as sketches for further exploration. It was a first attempt using the method of interweaving divergent stories, mostly mediated by me as a performer. Already in this part of the process, I did not want to explain my point of view explicitly, but rather to present the different and divergent elements, interwoven with each other, through simultaneous dramaturgy. The text was spoken, either by me or through a recoding, and written on sheets of paper. The following sign was introduced already at this early stage of the work, and has been a permanent part of the series.

At this early stage it was extremely difficult to foresee the effects of interweaving history and personal stories. What I hoped for was that the stories would evoke a sense of wonder about what a place at one point in history could mean and how it could become something very different at another time.

Moreover, how can history simultaneously be observed from this actual place in time? Bragdøy was a beautiful summer holiday destination, where some of the greatest Norwegian artists visited, grew up and developed. But at the same time people died in the cruellest ways here. Now I had the opportunity to start an important process here and build upon the ruins of both those periods.

In 2016 I have prepared a presentation of my ideas for the installation Ruins at KiK (Art in Context) conference in Kristiansand, held at an island called Bragdøy. The island had specific historical aspects, which I used as a departing point for the stories told through the installation.

In addition to the artefacts, signs describing them (some in an incorrect or displaced manner) were displayed in the space. In this way, the installation already began to resemble a museum exhibition.

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