“voice underneath” at Accelerator invitations guests to a performative movie screening led by Bergsmark herself. The screening is split into totally different components consisting of shifting photographs, a somatic train and a board sport.

Rising from Bergsmark’s lengthy expertise as a filmmaker, “voice underneath” has developed from the endeavour to broaden the mounted character of the movie medium; in time, materiality, narrative buildings and viewer place. By way of the screening, Bergsmark invitations the viewers to step out of the traditional passive viewers place of shifting picture and to expertise movie by a broad sensory register. The title of the work refers back to the artist’s want to discover and take heed to the variety of parallel voices past or alongside the omniscient voice over of movie. The artist needs to research the subversive potential of the movie medium by a physique of labor that comes with uncertainty, mobility and porous narratives.

“voice underneath” at Accelerator takes place in an set up divided into two areas during which two movies are offered. The primary darkish enclosing house presents a movie during which a number of our bodies have come collectively into one. A physique is gendered primarily by face, voice and entrance. On this movie, the main focus is on the again and the backbone. There’s a duality and ambivalence within the gesture of turning your again on somebody—it may be out of conceitedness in addition to concern. To show away from a possible menace is each to place oneself in a weak place however can be a strategic act of self-preservation. The making of the sound and choreography have been knowledgeable by acts of listening to the resonances of a previous in deep time earlier than the emergence of vertebrates. Jellyfish are a species seemingly far faraway from people, however there are similarities in our nervous methods which can be triggered by hazard. Is it potential to expertise traces in your individual physique from a time earlier than minerals got here collectively to type bones?

Elements of Bergsmark’s course of are initiated by an intuitive immediate in conditions the place states of heightened consideration and intimate presence can happen. The artist has a big archive of movie and bodily materials collected in such moments. The second house is put in as an arcade for board video games. Alongside the partitions, supplies and objects from this private archive are lined up. These objects capabilities because the items of the board sport. The movie proven right here incorporates a number of clips from the archive, along with fragments from different personal ongoing movie productions and located archive footage.

Each movies are guided by the concept of the totally different layers of time we harbour in our our bodies. Bergsmark attracts parallels between how reminiscences are located within the physique and the conventions of the movie medium:

“Identical to a movie the place the recording stays unchanged, trauma can be a time capsule that may take a static type in a single’s reminiscence, it’s repeated and formulated in the identical approach time and again.”

She is pushed by the need to discover how want, pleasure and liberation generally is a producing precept—by way of internal, outer and collective change. Traumaturgy is a time period Bergsmark has given her quest of growing dramaturgies with the capability to depict the vulnerability of queer and trans folks, with out the fixation on humiliation or trauma. As an alternative, the intention is to method the potential of vulnerability and uncertainty as liberating, transformative and pleasurable.

The screening at Accelerator begins with a second of shared silence. Bergsmark is involved in neurological capabilities and the way numerous strategies for trauma remedy departs from the autonomic nervous system and its laws of exercise and tranquility. A governing thought is {that a} seemingly passive physique could be the expression of an lively act of resistance. A central a part of each the method and the work offered at Accelerator is the component of play and video games. This a part of voice underneath resembles a board sport however is primarily structured across the components that outline play: the absence of targets goals and winners. In some social interactions—equivalent to partaking in play and video games—the autonomic nervous system can generate the bodily responses which can be a prerequisite for curiosity.

at Accelerator, Stockholm University
till April 14, 2024