Hunger for Pictures: Scene I: Magellania, Love Enqvist

Hunger for Pictures

Scene I: Magellania – Love Enqvist

Developed by curator Rowan Geddis and artist Love Enqvist, in collaboration with choreographers Sara Gebran, Caroline Byström and composer Lisa Holmqvist.

This staging will take as its starting point Magellania, an expanded film essay by Stockholm based artist Love Enqvist. The film explores the lapse between image and language through a complex web of relationships, both present and historical, that touch upon Isla Navarino at the southern tip of Patagonia. Struggling with the impossibility of accurately reading ‘images’, ones that are personal, historical, cultural or imagined, this scene will adopt a number of strategies in order to surmount this ‘gap’. Through various protocols of delegation, processes of mediation, translation and abstraction, and through a series of workshops in advance of the event, the initial materials of Magellania will be re-read and re-configured, giving them new form.

Magellania intertwines narrated moments of darkness with silent footage to tell the story of Cristina Calderón, the last speaker of the Yaghan language, whose death will close off a part of history to us. Attempting to rethink the colonisation of language and image, suggesting that ‘silence is not passive’, Magellania is, amongst other things, a meditation on affect and the dialectics of modernity.

“This is a story of an attempt to recreate/re-find a memory. A memory of a diving woman.
The screen, imagined or real, is here the place of mediation.
The staging of an appearance as disappearance.
My search for this involuntary memory has turned into an investigation and a quest for her. The diving woman. The ghost in me. The ghost of history.”
Love Enqvist, 2016

Hunger for Pictures is a wider program developed by curator Rowan Geddis, which explores our relationship to image production, consumption and distribution in a ‘post-historical’ age. Scene one explores the ‘image’ as the space of overlap between memory, perception and history, whilst considering how the technical image, in its various mediated forms, imbricates our collective historical and cultural consciousness. Hunger for Pictures is the second action related to an the ongoing research project entitled ‘Performing the Techno Imagination’, which conjures the late philosopher Vilém Flusser’s concept of the ‘Techno Imagination’ in order to consider artistic and performative strategies in engaging with and reading ‘that which is beyond us’. This research is given form through a series of actions, each exploring a certain position to, or reading of, these perceptual proposals, whilst aiming to explore the potential of the performative in a process-focused mode, a ‘live’ thinking through activity.

Action I and II of this ongoing series have been developed and presented under the auspices of the CuratorLab research programme, Konstfack.