Ida Ekblad MarIus Engh anawana haloba lars lauMann - Statoil

an authentic foreign language (an American’s idea of
“Scandinavian”!). Laumann plays the scene “backwards”, which
returns it to its original English.
The increasing obsolescence and strangeness of books,
the relationship between language and text, and the radical
transformation of links between the spoken word and a text
could be said to be themes of this work. For Derrida the
construction of archives and libraries also evokes the notion of
imprisonment. In Archive Fever he writes:
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Documents at once need a Guardian and a localisation. It is thus,
in this House arrest, that archives take place. 4
Laumann’s recent 3-channel film installation about Nico’s death
(You Can’t Pretend To Be Somebody Else – You Already Are),
a collaborative venture with Benjamin A. Huseby, is a mesmeric
take on the intriguing life and tragically absurd death of
a particularly fascinating cultural icon. Using three male
actors from the London drag collective House of Egypt (each
representing a different stage in her life), Laumann and Huseby
incorporate a dramatised voiceover based on interviews given
by Nico. As the title suggests, this film is essentially about the
collapse of identity, both in its central subject and in the broader
sense. Nico describes how she felt like a moving target and how
she wanted to occupy a “nowhere” space, how she never really
wanted to be a woman. To her, being a woman meant being
judged harshly as a mother, as a heroin addict and as a musician,
with striking disparity in relation to her male counterparts.
Laumann and Huseby negotiate these monologues through
beautifully shot footage in Ibiza – recreating that intense
poetic atmosphere found in the early films of Phillippe Garrel
in which Nico starred. Le Cicatrice Interieure (The Inner Scar),
1971, is the most obvious point of reference, with its dreamlike
scenes of Nico and Garrel wandering aimlessly in the desert,
without any coordinates, lost in an interior world of psychotropic
4. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz.
(University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2.
*The deterritorialisation of a major language by means of a minor
literature written in a major language from
a marginalised or minoritarian position.
experimentation. Laumann has told me that Dreyer’s cinematic
world of “dreams within dreams” in Vampyr (1932) was one of
their sources of inspiration. Indeed, when one considers that
Vampyr was based on the Sheridan Le Fanu story Carmilla, itself
a tale of shattered perception and transgressive sexuality, the
connection becomes evident. Laumann and Huseby mine the
layers of cultural mythology attached to Nico: the Warholian
aura she acquired and the sense of timelessness she exuded,
the experimental sexualities espoused at the time of her
involvement with the Velvet Underground, and her dissolution
into a world of anonymity. This elegiac installation (as with so
many of Laumann’s artworks) manages to foster a melancholic
tenderness towards its subject’s complicated persona.
Kari og Knut, Laumann’s new project, uses a variety of media
(including video and a return to found footage) and reflects
once more his great love of literature. He chooses another iconic
figure, that of the elusive J.D. Salinger, to explore issues relating
to both State and personal censorship. Laumann intentionally
draws on the Situationist tactic of “détournement” as developed
by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, 1967, where
found footage and materials are used subversively for new
ends (a tactic perhaps finding its more recent manifestation in
Deleuze’s conceptualising of a “minoring” strategy*). The title
Kari og Knut refers to a Norwegian nursery rhyme which bears
a close resemblance to the eponymous tale told in The Catcher
in the Rye: Holden’s fantasy of dedicating his life to catching
children as they run towards a cliff to their deaths.
Using films such as Can dialetics break bricks? and
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? as structural precedents, Laumann
appropriates scenes from the 1995 Iranian film Pari by director
Dariush Mehrjui, itself a version of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey,
and replaces the soundtrack with a voiceover by a teenage
Iranian girl berating both Salinger’s self-censorship and State