A dedication to Therese Christensen

My mother, Therese Christensen, was a painter and a feminist. She studied Fine Arts at UCLA in Los Angeles during the 60ties and early seventies. I remember her as an activist. 

She read Simone de Bouvoir, Virginia Woolf, and had friends in the Black Panther- movement in the United States. She wore a silver brooch that was formed as a fighting fist, the symbol of the Black Panthers. 

She attended poet nights in the Watts district with her friend, the poet Wanda Coleman. 

I remember her telling me about how Angela Davis -- the Black philosophy professor, writer, feminist, and activist -- was fired from her position by none other than Ronald Reagan.

My mother was inspired by John Cage, James Turell, Sidsel Endresen and many more. She was a colorist and in interviews she said that doubt was her friend.

In march 2017 she died of the disease ALS. A year or so before she passed we met in a cafe that is no longer there, "Helgesen" on "Tårnplass" in Bergen. 

I told her about my plans to write a book about artistic processes consisting of interviews I would do with several artists that I know: family, friends and colleagues. 

She said " But what about your art, Halldis?" 

In May 2017, there was a big exhibition at Kunstgarasjen that showed Therese Christensen's art. The title was " Echoes of Red and the River", inspired by the title of George Crumb's Orchestra piece from 1965 "Echoes of Time and the River". (Christensen 2017)

I wanted to make some music for the exhibition opening and invited Guro Skumsnes Moe, Else Olsen Storesund and my husband Trond Hugo Ahlsen to jointly make a piece communicating with upon my mother's paintings and drawings. 

I was leading the compositional process through rehearsals, in creative collaboration with the group members. 

This represented a creative start for me and generated further transdisciplinary projects and collaborations with Else and Guro in the projects "Hrafntinna/Black Obsidian and "Resonant Silence"

I acknowledge that without my mother's feminist background and my parent's approach to raising me informed by the feminist movement in the 70ties, (I subsequently got fire-trucks instead of baby dolls for christmas as well as other more or less frustrating ideological approaches) 

I would not have become a conductor. 

About her life as an artist she said: "Doubt is my friend"

And: "I am a colorist" 

She said to me after she got ill: "Halldis you have a deep focus, that is vital for creating art. "

She said: "What about your art?"