To Be a Work Means to Set Up a World: Into the Woods with Heidegger

Abstract

This video article is one outcome of a collaborative project with artist Thomas Wolsing in the summer of 2016. The collaboration was video recorded (FPS, head mounted camera). The footage was thereafter edited into a video article that documents emerging dimensions and themes of this project. My ambition for this collaboration was to experience and discover interlacements between, on the one hand, art theory (epitomized by some sentences of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”) and, on the other hand, artistic and physical-constructional work in building a land art piece. The video article presents dialogues and monologues in situ that circles around the problem of how to bodily and conceptually integrate art theory and concrete artistic practice and the dependence between and incompatibilities of art theory and art making. It shows the experienced integration of physical and discursive actions that, in the moment of performance, is elusive and refutes any ethical assessment. The video is in Danish with English subtitles.