Final Project - ÖR
premiered in January 2025.
As I set out to create a documentary theatre piece based on my personal experience, however, I moved away from direct representation and into a more abstract performance. As I found myself questioning the very impulse to narrate, explain, or resolve through art: What am I truly confronting?
As these questions deepened, I structured a baceline around two layers, isolation of once reality and a meeting framework. AS the idea was abstract as well as deeply introspective,
I wanted to reflect the self-enclosed nature of therapeutic spaces as well as keep a close connection to the audiences. AS a result, the performance became less about confession and more about tension—between exposure and protection, control and surrender. AS I tended to lean toward abstraction, AS to fix things, to escape into dreams, rather than meet myself with clarity.
AS ÖR ultimately became a kind of surreal dreamlike state rather than a linear story. AS surprise meeting within a Program of Honesty. AS if ÖR blends inner and outer realities, flowing in a hybrid form of lived and performed experience. AS this is a four parts script, the opening scene, the search for truth, the program of honesty, and the closing scene. AS the opening and closing scenes form a mirror of each other. AS they are identical in visual form but played in reverse.AS the character moves backwards and ends the journey where it began.
Everything I planned to do, everything I meant to say, remains unresolved.
Is that failure?
Or is it a kind of false performance?
When is anything truly finished, especially when life continues as a series of aftershocks?
To be alive is to carry many stories at once—perhaps that is the folding of a complicated answer.
I didn’t intend to twist things, or shift the subject. But sometimes it feels easier. More comfortable.
Still, I wanted to revisit the scene. The status. The bigger picture.
How did all of this happen?
How did it begin to slip away from me?
Am I missing an opportunity?
Did it already pass me by?
Why am I so afraid to speak?
And who, really, is listening?
Writing these words takes the breath out of me.
Reading them might knock me to the floor.
The moment I release a word, my thoughts scatter.
The moment I look around, I feel myself stepping outside my own mind.
Everything I meant to do.
Everything I wanted to say.
Everything I failed to complete.
I began to write, but I wasn’t in the right state.
I tried to remember, but nothing came.
I tried to understand, but couldn’t connect with what was happening.
So I began recording—a video diary.
I started asking:
Was this goal too much?
Was it boring?
Was it even mine?
Was it meant for others but somehow turned back on me?
At the desk, slightly turned away from the viewer, I unpack a backpack and a plastic box. Inside are fragments—diaries, loose sheets, a laptop. It’s the final stretch, and yet everything still feels undone.
I open the box. Among the contents is a notebook and a collection of elephants. My mother’s elephants. She collected them—odd as it may seem. We’re now in the fourth round of sorting through her belongings.
But I have a goal:
To get through this—consciously.
Not in anger or panic.
Not through justification.
Not for others.
Not by hiding anything.
Nothing left undone.
Will this become one of those moments I regret—because I didn’t have the courage to try?
I’ve created a jungle of excuses.
I’ve bathed in them like foam in a tub.
But when I blow on them, there’s nothing—just froth. It doesn’t clean. It just wraps in on itself.
What is a story, really, when I neither know where it starts nor whether it has ended?
This is a story of the unexpected.
A story of abandoning the story.
Of living with unclear references.
Of being tangled in it.
Viðmið – (English: Undefined Reference)
A Performative Documentary at Leifshús
Viðmið is a performative documentary rooted in a deeply personal video diary I began during a period of illness. Originally, this was the work I intended to complete as part of my final project in school. But as I worked on it, I realized that the process was still unfolding—unfinished, ongoing, and not ready to be concluded in a traditional sense.
The installation at Leifshús presented fragments from this journey: recorded thoughts, quiet observations, and moments of physical and emotional vulnerability. Through video, sound, and spatial presence, I explored what it means to exist in a state of uncertainty—when the body doesn’t follow expected rhythms, and when clarity, both personal and societal, is absent.
The title, Viðmið (Undefined Reference), reflects this condition: living without a fixed point of orientation, without clear answers. The work resists closure. Instead, it opens up space for witnessing, sensing, and being with what cannot yet be resolved.
Audiences were invited not only to view the work but to dwell inside it—within the layers of silence, tension, and quiet persistence that shaped my experience. In many ways, Viðmið is less a finished piece and more a trace of a process that continues.
During the third and fourth semesters, my focus shifted toward developing my final project. A key theme was the question of how to meet an audience, communicate my topics, questions, and concerns through an artistic work. I continued to explore and deepen my research, while also looking for a form that could carry those ideas into the public space and position them within the field of performing arts.
I submitted the documentation of my working process toward the final project in December 2024—a way to trace and reflect on the artistic decisions I made along the way.
OFF AS FAR
– In Dialogue with Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson"
This script emerged from the video—initially, just an experiment, a way to practice writing a script.
AS in thIS video, documenting my actions, words to me in the process and afterwards. While editing, I found myself thinking about Þorvaldur Þorsteinsson and his thoughts on art, especially his reflections on master’s studies and what it means to create in a learning environment.
What follows is a fictional dialogue—a way of continuing a conversation with Þorvaldur, long after his own work left its mark on me.
I traveled to Berlin for the Workshop of Workshops—a gathering that became something more. This short video is part of an ongoing documentation process, capturing fragments of time shared with my beloved group, ZERO and WOW.
