Another Forensic Charade
September 15 - December 9,2001

The ocean has many faces - it's been an inspiration to humanity for aeons. With "Another Forensic Charade", I wanted to add my own views of the currents of commerce and culture flowing through a port and the museum at its edge. "Another Forensic Charade" was a commissioned video work made by Magasin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden for a show entitled "Free Port." Essentially, Richard Julin, the curator for the museum, was curious about the linkages between architecture, history, and how film can be seen a kind of hyper-textual archaeology. The harbor where the museum is located was Stockholm's and all of Sweden's "free trade zone" for almost 60 years - and when it was opened, there were cameras to document the process. The artists Julin invited to present work in the show - myself, Cosima von Bonin, John Bock, and Janine Antoni, all engaged the idea of ports as portals, as entryways not only into physical landscapes, but into the historical relations that configure how land-use and water use occurs in a world of networks and hyper-active trade routes.

Sweden has several strange histories that are interogated in my "Another Forensic Charade" video piece. I took a lot of historical footage from the archives of the harbor and museum and remixed it into a "portrait" of the flow of commerce spanning almost an entire century. The harbor has a lot of strange histories - it was once the largest importer of bananas, for example, and was also near the center of some of the earliest mass developments of telecommunications centers (Ericsson is based there...). The "Free Port" and all of the sundry sailors and ships that passed through it conditioned my video portrait of a culture where many a sailor could say, like the words of one of Sweden's greatest dramatists, August Strindberg who said in 1887: "I am a devilish fellow, who has mastered many arts....And all the things I have tossed off! Though Sweden was as hard as a stone! Novels and verses, plays, good and bad, Swedish Histories and Chinese, and four kids, the fifth on its way, and two wives..." It was definitely a wild place. Strindberg's paintings focused on the ocean. It seems to be a recurring theme in Swedish culture, and the care and almost analytic quality with which the Swedes maintain their harbors attests to a culture that might seem carefree on the surface, but like the "Freeport" has an intense underlying depth. My video portrait was projected onto fragmented record cover sleeves made to resemble the harbor floor, which on a clear day, you can almost see. The Swedes take such good care of the waters of their capital that you can go swimming right in the middle of town. Try doing that in the Hudson... The harbor of Stockholm where the museum is located was considered to be a "free trade" zone - and it was meant to be a portal to the rest of the world. When Stockholm's Free Port was inaugurated on the 27th of September 1926 the entire proceedings were what we would call today a "photo-op." In the film that was made, one can see the inauguration ceremony with king Gustav V on a throne and observing the proceedings. Things have changed so much since then, and I wanted to really give a sense of historical ambiance. I included film works from the archive of films that documented the architectural growth of the harbor, and I based a lot of the footage on various MAX patches developed with Luke Dubois from Columbia University's Electronic Music department.

There is a limited edition mix CD for sale at the museum that can be ordered from Magasin 3.