In Conversation

[…] PETER GESCHWIND Definitely. And that’s really exciting. It’s like what you don’t expect, that’s harder to find, if you don’t already know what you’re looking for. You have to be very observant, if something happens then you have to grab hold of it and not let go and just think ‘something will appear, perhaps something silly, but it doesn’t matter because the phenomenon itself is the same’. At first you didn’t spot it and then it appears in front of your eyes. And as soon as that happens it exists in the world. It’s nothing strange, it can be like a little dot on a white wall, whatever, that’s not the point, it’s rather that you didn’t see it, because so much has been filtered away.

FIA BACKSTRÖM It becomes more full on, like a bloody rich experience of different ways of seeing.

PG That’s been the major driving force behind it. I’m really interested in that. One question is how you can see or discover something that we don’t already know, if our perception is primarily based on personal memories and experiences.

Here there are sixteen windows. We’re working on a sign piece with digital letters, like the ones that used to be on cash registers, a really magnified segment, a digital number that you can write with and animate. That’ll be the first thing you see from the street. Perhaps the title will roll past, which is Efterbild or After Image. You can make simpler animations with information. It’s the same principle as with a neon sign. Just on and off.

I want to do something that lowers expectations, but where you still get what it’s about: now something is switched on and now it’s switched off.

FB It makes me think of an exhibition at the Pompidou by Jean-Luc Godard from 2006. In Godard’s world the flow of reality always feels included in the moment of filming. Inside the exhibition there were models from his films with different point of views, and photos and props. It was on the ground floor and you could see out, so when you were standing there watching a film, seeing how he had done something visually, at the same time you could see a passer-by or someone standing outside looking in, who then became ‘included’ in the film. The windows turned into frames. The difference between inside and outside was blurred and reality became fictionalized. He succeeded in implicating what was outside the exhibition within it.

PG I don’t know if you saw the exhibition at Färgfabriken, Automatic. I worked a lot with lighting there. The back section was quite dark and spotlights made it so that as a visitor your shadow was cast on the wall. Then I mixed that up with video projections of other shadows, which merged with the real ones, and then I animated those shadows until it escalated into a chaos, in a cycle.

GUNILLA KLINGBERG It was so marvellous. You didn’t know what was actually going on.

PG It felt as if it was difficult to see, who else is here, what’s happening? You recognise yourself and you see that you’re a part of it. It sounds a bit similar, that you’re trying…

FB Exactly! Mix it up – there’s a possibility here if you’ve seen the animation beforehand that you think you’re seeing the outside, but it’s the inside…

PG … The cables will come out here. You could keep working on making it really clear so that it feels familiar, that you’re inside now, and a minute ago you were outside.

FB Yes, when you’re outside you get to look inside, the whole thing is revealed before you’ve even seen it. Then you’ll also become conscious of your own movements in this fiction, something happens to the brain I think…

PG That’s exactly what I want to get at. Here you’ll enter the corridor again and I’m thinking there’ll be a janitor’s closet with some storage shelves and some bits of rubbish. And on the shelf there should be a few things and at the top a large can with a nozzle, like a petrol can, with an animated drip, a bit like with the ping-pong ball, except this one ‘fades in’, and now and again it goes pfui-plut-donk, and the drop plops down onto the floor. And on the floor maybe there could be a number of circles, like ty-tada-ty-tada, so it becomes like rings on the water. You’re supposed to get the feeling of standing in something flammable.

It plays a bit on this computer game thing. It’s something that’s going on all the time. Then you get to the window sign but from inside. Here a backdrop has been constructed and sectioned off, here’s a box. And when you get to this point then there’s an earthquake going on in what could be an abandoned office. There are tables and chairs and something shaking in there, but using just two frames, the sound of an earthquake, a bit of jingle jangle and darkness. It’s a looped earthquake, a reference to the movie Earthquake. You walk past that, a bit like with the drop of oil thing. By this stage you’re starting to figure out what’s going on, then you’re led back to the room outside where the chairs are, and you enter the biggest room with the large tableau.

FB It has a kind of Fun House-feeling, you get confused and you don’t really know where you are.

PG That’s the idea, in part. But, the biggest challenge is to create an environment where there are enough different things backing each other up, so that you get to a level where there isn’t space to question, because so much is going on and it’s hard to pinpoint. You have to find those little ‘hooks’, without creating further questions.

FB What do you mean with space for questions?

PG The choice of, for example, a drop or an earthquake – you have to make it feel like it’s a janitor’s closet in a computer game, right, or an abandoned office at Bonniers. Finding a way into things, so you don’t just think ‘What the fuck is this, why is this here?’. Bjarne Melgaard is usually pretty good at creating that kind of chaos, so that you can’t … so it becomes natural. You’re sort of making a cosmos of stuff, it might be totally weird, but eventually it begins to create its own logic. If you can just locate that state, it’s the small details, using the room and the conditions, whatever it is… if, for example, the chair would be used again… So that you’re not feeling like you have to think about it, but instead you think, ‘Okay, aha, sure’. […]

The conversation in its entirety is published in the artist’s monograph, After Image, which is produced in connection with the exhibition. The book will be released at the end of March 2023 and, in addition to extensive visual material, includes essays by Sara Arrhenius, Fia Backström/Gunilla Klingberg, Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen, Maria Lind, Theodor Ringborg and Niclas Östlind. Together, they illustrate the multifaceted artistry of Peter Geschwind, but also of his person. Graphic design by Andreas Doré.

Image: Peter Geschwind, After Image, 2023. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Béranger.