ELLEN RINGSTAD

Site-specific installation.

Materials: Prison cells, back-projection on plexiglass (Video loop: Mnemonic Gymnastics, 2012. 1'30''), wooden stool, sound box (wood, speakers), audio loop (Agnosia, 2012, 55'10'').

 

 

For the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story.

But you have to choose: live or tell.

 

- Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea.

This site-specific installation is one of three artworks produced for my Bachelor of Fine Arts final exam exhibition at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, 2012, in the Old Prison of Bergen (see also related artworks: In-titled (2012) and Whiteout II (2012)). 

In this piece I explore the prison cell both spacially and metaphorically. 

 

The correctional institution was built in 1862-1867 and was discontinued in 1990. It is now a protected building. 

The various elements of Agnosia (meaning the inability to process sensory information)  are mounted in two opposite prison cells; one door is shut while the other remains open for the audience to enter.

 

A back-projected video through matted plexiglass can be seen in the observation window of the closed cell:  Mnemonic Gymnastics (2012) is a 1'30'' animation loop: each frame a digital collage, has been manually crafted from fragments of personal photographic material in a "decomposed composition", permanently damaging the original files.

Inside the open cell there are two additional elements: a wooden stool to sit on facing the animation loop, and a wooden speaker emitting the voice of "Heather", a computer program reciting my bachelor thesis Agnosia. The audio loop lasts 55'10'' as the sound reverberates within the flaking prison walls. 

Above: short video documeting Mnemonic Gymnastics in situ.