Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2020-04-17Label: Topos
Vestindiske Forestillinger (West Indian Imaginings), 50 minutes, 2017By Jacob Kirkegaard & Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
Text by Tobias R. Kirstein
Originally created for Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark © 2017
2017 marked the centenary of the sale of Denmark’s colony in the so-called West Indies, which is the fulcrum of Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s collaboration made specifically for the Danish art gallery Overgaden in Copenhagen, Denmark. Recordings from the islands were used to generate imaginings of this alleged ‘Paradise Lost’: the loss of something once possessed.
Despite increasing, political awareness of Denmark’s role as a colonial power, many Danish travel agencies continued into 2017 to sell a paradisiacal idealisation of the former Danish colony. And every year thousands of Danish tourists crossed the Atlantic to experience the ‘Danish West Indies’. But what was the appeal? The climate, culture, food and beaches? Or is perhaps some nostalgic dream of past glory?
This was the question at the heart of Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard’s work: During their artistic research, they followed in the footsteps of tourist brochures to the former Danish colony. The work was presented in a room bathed in green light, reminiscent of the green screens used in film – blank backgrounds for the subsequent insertion of a fictional setting that makes it possible for people to appear in impossible worlds. Using this green light, the artists aimed to place the listener in ‘exotic’ surroundings that are solely the product of the individual’s subjective imagination. This reflects the artists’ interest in sound as a physical material and bodily anchor point, something they used in 'Vestindiske Forestillinger’ to translate and reflect Danish post- colonial consciousness 2017 into audible form.
Tobias R. Kirstein text, The Archipelagic Body can be read here.