We include fragments from our working notes because, together with the documents in the Danish National Archive that we consulted at the beginning of our research, they are part of the archive of this score. As with any archive, some elements are trivial, some are momentous. Together they are dynamic agents that shape our individual sense of who we are and they become part of social and cultural life as we develop this exposition. Its performative framework enabled the research and its score to be shared and experienced by others. Our work is therefore not so much anchored in memory, documentation, or preservation as in our everyday lives and the circulation of our practices.
Risk is embedded in the framework of our collaboration. To create the score, we write a shared text online that includes notes written during our monthly meetings, as well as transcribed and written discussions that we craft into the framework for a score with no single author. We also leave spaces for our individual essays as central building blocks in the score, but these are never shared before we are doing the first performance. Surprising each other with material we bring to the first performance has been a staple of our shared practice from the start and this requires a deep trust in our shared process. In Living and Lasting we included the objects, wrapped and sent to Oslo, which were revealed to the audience and the four of us for the first time in that performance.
2. Per's comment:
It could not have been me teaching that workshop, and certainly not tango, which I only can fake - not teach, but I seem to recall that there was a Salsa-teacher who was giving a crash course in Salsa or some other Latin-dances for the Summer Session participants. I reckon that I took part and encouraged you to do the same.
5. Luisa's comments:
Not to forget the messiness, the unconscious behaviors. We bring ourselves to the setting of collaboration and it seems the problems or challenges are even more visible in a group that attempts an egalitarian structure. Still, in the inevitable slow process of actual democracy, it is worth doing.
If I think back to our first meeting with Myna, it is at the seaside of Falsterbo1 in Sweden. On the last night of the symposium, Per was teaching people to dance2, I think it was a kind of tango, and Myna and I were the only two just watching. I asked if she wanted to join, and she said, “I don’t dance.”3 Or at least she didn’t at that time because that memory is supplanted by one in Iceland at Sauðárkrókur in the north where by all accounts she should have won an air guitar contest on our last day at NSU. Extremes amid such constancy is how I have come to know Myna. I think about Per also at Sauðárkrókur in between intensive day-long sessions, us sitting on a small sofa in the hallway at the top of a flight of stairs in the Áeskóli where we were all staying- endless discussions and laughing late into the night, although this was the session where he was roped into becoming Chair and there were heated arguments about the structure of the organization during that general assembly as well. Or at the old spa town, Druskininkai in Lithuania pouring over the language of NSU’s statutes, reworking and revising, taking such care with the wording, just as Myna and I did in editing the compendium together. We understand the particularity and weight of words and their power. Camilla: partner, Berlin coffee shops and planning meetings, reading Derrida, reading cards, NYC pregnancy test hotel, Humboldtian humiliations of Not Knowing, carrying each other, a dance studio in a former Soviet university in Vilnius, MoKS4 artists residency in southern Estonia with Myna and the northern lights you were too sick to see, but seeing your path so clearly through your work on the island of Fårö in Sweden, the flashes of recognition of what it means to be in community together, the pleasures and the pain, the struggle of collaboration5.
1. Per's comment:
When mentioning Falsterbro, I recall the conversation I had with Myna on 14 February 2020 - Oslo/Manchester, which is included below in our "Notes on the process."
3. Myna's comment:
Did I really say such a tiresome thing as 'I don't dance'? But I do! Last Saturday I and two young women were the only people who danced at a friend's 70th birthday party. I have loved dancing at the closing party of the Nordic Summer University symposia. Sometimes it was as though the real free spirit of the NSU circulated most easily on those evenings. Some people's dancing wasn't just a gentle rhythmic movement but was fierce, new movements that I'd never seen before. That was what kept me returning to NSU, the gentle holding and the vigorous shaking up and down and roundabout.
4. Camilla's comment:
I remember well this residency and our work on crossing contexts. Here is the link to it, crossing contexts.