this is what I do
Skriver och spacear om dagarna, försöker hitta vart jag är påväg och var jag kommer ifrån. En lärare ber mig att definera scenografi, ber mig att göra det jag har försökt med i två år på två timmar.
Det blir en halvhjärtad kärleksförklaring, i en värld där jag bara översätter.
What is scenography?
It’s hard to not be philosophical and atmospheric when you talk about non-defined things. Me and scenography is a relationship I’m afraid of defining. Am I to become a scenographer? Or an artist? I don’t know, and I like all my long love affairs, I want to stay in between all the definitions.
But when someone asks me, I do need to give defining a shot.
Scenography is nothing without space and time. I concider myself to be an artist in space and time. But what is then a space? As it always seems to be a starting point, I can’t start to explain scenography without first explaining what a space is.
A space is much more than the room given to me to work in. It could be a phrase in a text that blows up into a universe. It could be a feeling another person gives you; what happens when you silently sit and watch someone face for a while. Spaces gets born, collide, collapse, breathes and live in front of us. It’s just a matter of seeing it and understand it. Seeing spaces is seeing universes all around us.
And when you start seeing spaces, scenography becomes a tool to work with it.
I work as a translator. Space is a language that I work to understand. When I do, I translate it into other languages; using all the means and medias contemporary art and theatre has at it’s hands today, such as sound, light, installations etc.
I work to translate the universes I see around me to more accessible languages, to be able to give these spaces to other people; to the audience.
Scenography contains architechture, memory, atmosphere and bodies; and these are also my tools to tell stories through spaces. To translate spaces for an audience to understand it.
So, in short; scenography is what surrounds us; when we look at it in that way. To be a scenographer is to be a spatial translator.
It’s never what we say; only what we see and how it feels.
