Through the Mosaic Eye, 2023
Exhibited at ‘First There is A Mountain’, Wadden Tide, Blåvandshuk, 2023, Denmark
Commissioned work
Iron, Fresnel lenses, concrete, 380 x 310 cm
How do we orient ourselves in a new era?
In ancient times, sailors could navigate the oceans by looking up at the night sky. They had, over generations, developed an inner technology. Today, to a much greater extent, we have replaced this inner technology with an external one. One could argue that we have outsourced our inner autonomy and power.
In an expanding world of information, opinions, spin, manipulation of truths, and falsehoods, finding direction can be truly challenging.
Facts are relative, and truths and lies have entered an impressive level of osmotic interrelations.
To understand or perhaps experience our inner orientation, it helps to understand the space around us – and the forces or systems we are part of.
Here we arrive at the new school that has been teaching us the path since time immortal.
Look into the mosaic eye to “see”.
The Snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children
G[r]AIN
A solidarity project in reaction to Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine.
When the war in Ukraine broke out, Roepstorff reached out to a number of fellow artists and cultural workers personally entangled in the dramatic international event, asking them to share their reflections and reactions in the form of a letter, a poem, or a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing. For every text received the artist erects columns made of grains of sand that, by binding together, represent a multitude of voices. In a procedural twist, as the project progresses, the physical accessibility to the space decreases, while the gallery morphs into a growing number of “speech pillars”.
To amplify the shrinking space between the columns, the artist has involved two performers to interpret and choreograph each text as scores that trigger specific gestures. Their movements – scratches, impositions, alterations – further alter Roepstorff´s installation by causing the façades and surfaces of the columns to crumble over time, aided by changes in heat and humidity. Additional restrictions imposed on performers by the artist – sand shoes and extended arms as two examples – impact their actions, casting them as the narrative tools of the project.
Embracing volatile materials – language, sand, gestures – G[r]AIN gives form to shapeless acts that imitate within a conceptual space how we as society constantly reinvent control mechanisms that prevent us to achieve independence and autonomy. In Roepstorff´s ever-changing environment, such perpetuating systems of domination are visualised by enacting ways to break free.
In the face of the current atrocities, every word written to Roepstorff and passed onto us in our role as witnesses and silent viewers seeks to resist division and strengthen those cultural ties that are at the core of a healthy and dynamic global arts community.
Special thanks to performers Matilde Mørk and Mirko Guido, sand sculptor Bruno MacDonald, Statens Kunstfond, Det Obelske Familiefond, and curator Diana Baldon.
