Author: Corne Strootman
Contested/negotiated shore and the follow up film, contested/negotiated Oresund, can be imagined as the two rooms of a small exhibition. There is no hierarchy between these rooms and either one could be seen as the starting point.
Contested/Negotiated shores
Original Narrative
The completion of the Oresund-bridge has effectively turned the Swedish and the Danish coasts into one metropolitan region surrounding a vast body of water. This body of water could almost be seen as a huge public park as the Oresund-region has a long tradition of living, bathing and recreating along the shore. Yet similar traditions on both sides of the water have led to very different looking landscapes and atmospheres. Our theory is that these differences have been created by the many contestations and negotiations along the Ö resund. On the one hand you have the strait itself, contesting with the inhabitants of the region by taking away land on one place and providing lush beaches on another, waiting to change things up again.
On the other hand you have the bathers, the surfers, the kayakers, the dog owners, the nudists, the private villas and the hiking paths: they all share the same coastline and need to negotiate to find their place. These two processes make up a powerful dynamic.
Inspired by Rudiger Neumann’s earlier films we try to display this contested/negotiated landscape by transecting along the coast, from one bathing landmark to another. During this transect we systematically film and take soil samples, as well as making notations of places and experiences that cannot be conveyed in this system. We display our findings in a way that Ottmar Ette describe as a curiosity cabinet, acknowledging the gaps in our knowledge but aiming for a deeper understanding.
Contested/Negotiated Oresund
Follow Up
Where the first exposition displayed the contestations and negotiations through systematic and factual notation, the intention for the follow up is to show the contestations and negotiations through the small things that stood out during our systematic notations, but were not noted anywhere except for in our minds. This lead to the film “Contested/Negotiated Oresund”. The inspiration for the film is twofold. First there is “Knittefeld – stadt ohne geschichte”, a film by Gerhard Benedikt Friedl, where the filmmaker shows images of Knittefeld and its surroundings whilst telling stories that have happened in the village. Although there is thematic overlap and the images strengthen the story, there is not geographical coherence between the two. Second there is the Museum of Jurassic technology that is described in Gini Lee’s “intention to notice” as an “ironic museum, where playing with history and historical consciousness is the intent, and the separation or connection of the art of the collector is inseparable from the perception of the artefact” and as an “an unreliable narrator where fact and fiction collide and the curator makes use of information that lies on the edges of our cultural literacy”.
The film tells the story of the people along the coast of the Oresund. These stories are based on experiences I had (both first and second hand) with actual inhabitants, places, histories, atmospheres, phenomenon and laws whilst researching the Oresund. These experiences are all freely combined into stories that are imposed on a series of videos consisting mostly of the systematically shot footage from earlier in the course, similar in style to “Knittefeld”. The end result is another curiosity cabinet , this one displaying the local, the poetic, the ephemeral and the small scale. The non specificity of location seems counter intuitive to this goal, but makes sense when you consider the fast pace at which the strait changes. It is meant to get the viewer to question what they see, to be critical and figure out where one truth ends and another begins, not to blindly accept a story as true, but not dismiss the value of an untruth either, similar to the MJT.
Together with the installation “Contested/Negotiated shores”, the two curiosity cabinets are an attempt to provide an alternative to the standard site study, that, according to Andrea Kahn “describes what we already know”. Instead it gives an insight into the complexities of the Oresund, and informs a viewer on what to research, and what questions to ask, instead of bombarding them with (sometimes irrelevant) facts. Where Kahn criticizes standard site studies to make one blind to the aspects that are not displayed, this exhibition is meant to open the viewer’s eyes to the Oresund they don’t know.
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