Interview: Torbjørn Rødland

Nils Stærk Contemporary at Art | 39 | Basel

You are exhibiting both video and photography here at Art Basel. What combines your things?

The first piece that was chosen this time was the new film, I AM LINKOLA (2007). The film's starting point is the ideas of the radical Finnish environmentalist Penttii Linkola, who sees depopulation as the only way to save the planet. My hope was that Linkola's nihilistic - and ecofascist - world view would influence the way nature is perceived in the film. The political hopelessness of Linkola's position was also the starting point for a potential dialogue between my work and the work of Gardar Eide Einarsson, who I'm sharing Nils Stærk's Art Premiere booth with. Einarsson often works with a similar position: The individual who is completely on the outside of society.

It is described somewhere as anti-social behaviour.

That's right. So these ideas, this film, was my starting point, and then I chose four photographs that I felt could go well with the film. I do not work in series anymore, but rather with single images that I put next to each other and force to talk to each other, but my pieces do not communicate anything very strongly or very clearly. In practical everyday use, like journalism, photography is asked to communicate something specific. I'm more interested in the openness of the medium. Rather than narrowing down the meaning of each image, I look at its paradoxes. By putting different photographs together, either in a film, a gallery space or in a book, I try to build a small universe. The images give meaning to each other. I try to avoid pushing one idea to the viewer. The viewer then has to make use of herself in order to make sense of it all. Also, I believe in communicating on the level of myth. Just showing a piece of reality isn't sufficient. Photographs called documentation tend to frustrate me.

Torbjørn Rødland: I AM LINKOLA (still), 2007. 7 min. Loop Progressive video/ DVD

Thorbjørn Rødland: I AM LINKOLA (excerpt videoed at Art | 39 | Basel), 2007. 7 min. Loop Progressive video/ DVD

Can you try and elaborate on this distinction between the mythical and the documentary?

Documentary photography seems to think reality is easy to access and stimulating to the human mind. I believe our access to - and interest in - reality is pretty limited. To make sense, reality has to be mythologised. More than replaying how this was dealt with before, my interest is how it is done today. Mass media plays a key role. I'm interested in how popular images help us make sense of the world.

You focus on nature both in your video and in your pictures, what does nature mean to you in your art?

At the same time as I'm looking at images, I try to reach some sort of a core, and nature is interesting as it doesn't change with history like any artifact. Looking at a culturally produced thing, you can wonder where and when it was made, but when you look at nature, culture is mainly in your way of looking. In post-modern art, nature was criticised and debunked. Everything was culture. If I have to go with just one of them, it will have to be nature. We are animals. Why not accept knitting and blogging as natural activities?

Still there is a strong contrast between man or man-made things and nature in your pieces.

I don't know. I think I look at man-made and organic objects with similar eyes. Or maybe it's more correct to say that the images are debating the difference between them.

Torbjørn Rødland: Club Moss, 2005-08. 140 x 110 cm. C-print on alu.

The woman in the film is present without being present, she seems drugged.

That is open to interpretation, but I guess I'm interested in this passivity, where you are not participating in the world but rather just looking at it. On one level, both the films and the photographs are about looking at images. In the clinical definition of melancholy, what the patient sees does not lead to an impulse to act. Nothing is relevant, everything is there to just look at. This is the non-practical way of looking. It's the aesthetic perversion.

I'm showing another video at Air de Paris' Art Basel booth. It also has a hidden apocalyptic interest. In one image the number 2012 is spelled out with matchsticks in the snow. Following the Mayan Calendar, 2012 is now the last year we'll count before the end of the world December 2012. After Christianity changed our approach to time, every generation has waited for it to end. Since nothing happened around 2000 it's been quiet for a while, but now everyone seems to be coming together around the number 2012. What is new now is the tendency to take the planet's side, and say that Gaia would be better off without us. If we die, it's all for the better. Pentti Linkola shows just how problematic these ideas get.

None of the films have a beginning or end. They're loops. Longing for the end of time is also a longing for the last real historic event: the breaking of the loop.

That is a quite bleak world view.

In every death you can look for beauty and the beginning of new life or a new loop, but yes: it is at least the ending of the trivial everyday loop that modern romantic men and women long to escape. It's both bleak and peaceful.

Thank you

Thorbjørn Rødland: NON-PROGRESS (excerpt videoed at Art | 39 | Basel) 2006, Progressive video/ DVD, 8 min. Loop

Torbjørn Rødland: Arms, 2008. 76 x 60 cm. C-print on alu.

Torbjørn Rødland: Butterflies, 2007. 60 x 78 cm C-print on alu.

Torbjørn Rødland: Thirteen Fortynine, 2007. 30 x 38 cm. C-print on alu.