This "manifesto", which emerged in its first version six years ago, was initially intended to become an agitatorial sound-piece consisting of ambiguous voices in several languages. It ended up a backdrop and an insistent reminder while I was pondering other less agitatorial pieces relating to gender, gender neutrality and transgression of gender.
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The Croa River community consists of approximately four hundred families spread out across eighty thousand hectares of Amazonian forest. They aspire to see the land they inhabit become an extraction reserve, and in fact, it is in the process of becoming precisely this: one of the new territories in Acre. As such, it is a good example of the current trend toward territorialization in the Brazilian state. It is also a good example of what territories stand for: self-organization, sustainable growth, and local knowledge.
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During the last few years, I have in my art been working with the understanding of time in different ways. When I spent a few months in NYC in 2002 it became apparent to me that I often understood time as a part of space. I saw time as a variable of space, and I found it difficult to separate that which has already happened from what is happening in the present. This made me question my linear perception of time.
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Point out a compass course and make an investigation. Make it a game. Investigate the relation between you as a citizen and the resistance of the city, when you are walking a straight line, following a pre-defined compass course. Investigate what obstacles your body will meet: the air friction; other bodies; ditches you are forced to go down into and up again as they pass your way.
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Image: A very sunny late summers day at the southern coast of Sweden. On the beach a placard has been erected, 3,60 x 2,55 meters. Behind it, the sea and the sandy beach. The sun stands low and shines like a lamp on the placard. A shimmering light from the sea. The placard is painted with straight lines, in the same colors as the sky, the sea and the beach. It is quite windy and Dad is standing behind the placard, holding a rope to straighten it up. On the placard it is written:
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SQUID said they wanted me to write about that which triggers me, which makes me want to do things, create. The things that give me energy, something important to me and thus also a part of my work as an artist. I thought it would be fun to write. Exciting. Possibly demanding, but in a challenging way. I was thinking I was going to write about Seinfeld.
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Part 2 of “All Talk, No Action” (see below).
To deal with, and act within the artistic field today is to make a choice:
-Either you are with us or against us!
And we all know that the second option does not exist. There is no “against us”, we are already “with” from the very beginning, and probably all the way to the end.
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What is the difference between saying and doing, and what does that have to do with choosing a theme?
- My name is Fredric Gunve and I work as an artist. I have made exhibitions, art actions, performances, situation sensitive events, installations, I also teach and write texts. I have often been asked:
- What is the theme of your work?
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Near old master Gusti Nyoman Lempad´s house
Gusti´s Pizza Delivery

So contrary to western art:
no vacant space, no omits
in physical meaning
but a vast surface for dreams

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Script of a video-letter to Thomas Hoving, former director at the MET and author of the unforgivable Art for Dummies.
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The subject is distinguished from the non-subject by the minimum of freedom to be itself, i.e. it has the freedom to defend its self in view of real unfreedom. A human being cannot be reduced to its status as mere object. It knows, as Carl Schmitt says, "not only birth," the facticity of its having been cast, "but also the possibility of a rebirth," which, as Hölderlin says in The Course of Life, is "the freedom to set out whither he will". There is therefore only one obligation for the human subject: to be free in view of its freedom.
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The common octopus, Octopus Vulgaris, can often be seen hung out to dry in the harbour of Antiparos, Greece. Low season, high tide - this is where the Swedes go for vacation, the common Swede. These two kinds of vulgaris are brought together in Greek cuisine; on the small island of Antiparos octopus is served at every tavern. We will stay here for a week, enough time to try all the vegetarian dishes on the menus twice and hopefully also enough time to find a living octopus.
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On Sept. 11 2002 a group of 80 pigeons, posing as white doves evoking peace, were released in the New York City area. It was a tribute that went quickly awry as a fundamental misunderstanding became apparent. These pigeons from a poultry market, originally destined for soup, were confused with homing pigeons- resilient birds that after release are able to navigate to homes up to 600 miles away.
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A local Zambian dance performance with African masks in variations of black and white. The children sob and roar. Their expressions of fear and their screams in a foreign language sink deep down inside me. Why the masks seem to terrify them so, I cannot understand. It is a game, but still and all, it isn't. The black children I usually play with glance at us.
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In New York's Latin quarters, "El Barrio", in east Harlem and in the Bronx, music is developed under the best possible conditions. Here the Afro-Cuban rhythms meet American jazz harmonies. It's no accident that New York is an important hub of new innovative music. To call oneself a drummer in this environment without any knowledge of clave would be a joke.
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17.09.2000. The Red Light District in Amsterdam is 700 years old and at a distance looks rather charming, with all the red lamps, cobblestones and picturesque bridges. Unaccustomed as I am to the area, I study the surroundings and watch how others act and move. Several people window-shop.
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One thing leads to another - so can the world be related. Causal connections above and beyond the easily predictable make me curious and therefore the chain of effects motif occupies an important place in my work, especially as a narrative means.
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I am a thoroughly urban person, having grown up in Tallinn, and later living in Riga, St Petersburg and New York. Nevertheless, on St John's Day in 1996 I found myself on the balcony in Kütiorg, reading Nietszche's 'Ecce Homo', realizing that cities as such has nothing more to offer me.
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If you look at a map of Petersburg, you will immediately see that Narvskaya Zastava is an isolated zone, surrounded by a ring of factories, railroad tracks and shipyards. Before the revolution, it was part of the city's proletarian outskirts, an historical hotbed of dissent. The historical decision to begin the October Revolution was made here.
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The first days of the experiment had been uncomfortable, claustrophobic. Imagined sounds caused him to react as if someone was just outside - knocking, steps, distant conversations. But they were only sound memories. The only thing that there was to listen to in fact was the murmuring of his own blood circulation.
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As I, in any situation where emotions are called upon, invariably turn to vocabulary to facilitate and comprehend, I also understand the arts through words. Every visual question, statement and sensation needs to pass through this internal transformer...in order for me to place it in the correct category in the winding tunnels of my comprehension to store for further interpretation.
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Notes for a book dispersed around the world
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I live in the house during the construction of the sculpture. I cut myself on bamboo sticks, bump into the large spades that poke out of the tunnels. They dig, hollow out the house to make a new existence in it. I have nowhere to sit - the chairs have either knives or bamboo fastened to them - the refrigerator is covered with staples.
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This I have come to know about home
since I began to think that I want home
to be like this
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Today there are 1,600,000 registered species on earth. It is reckoned that around 320,000 of them will have disappeared by the year 2020. Around 2050 it is assumed that every other species (800,000 species) will have vanished. What is a species worth?
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Why Michel Foucault? Because philosophy in Foucault's sense is a PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, an act of solitude. The solitude of the subject of philosophical experience has nothing to do with pathetic or narcissistic, depressive self-enclosure. The solitude of the philosophical subject is an act of resistance. The subject resists the easiness of mere opinion. It opens itself to new experiences, the EXPERIENCE OF THE NEW SELF.
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A strong dazzling sun from a cloudless blue sky. Glass facades emerge in the sunlight. A house of glass looms into view. A panning and presentation of a city constructed entirely of glass: Crystal Palace.
[...] we wish everyone a good morning. Today in room 101 we'll be showing a film on the legendary mountain, Mt. Everest, which according to our sources reaches around 8848 m. At the same time, in room 314, the classical costume drama, Room with a view, will be screened. For children, there will be a visit by a clown.
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As a result of filmic expression that has benefited from technological advances, the fusion of Ìthe visualÌ and Ìthe narrativeÌ is now resulting in unprecedented forms of expression. What kinds of stories are being told by artists who have acquired the medium of 'the moving image?' How are these stories being told? The focus of this essay will be on storytelling in the medium of the moving image, which has seen a rapid growth since the mid-nineties.
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I am at an art exhibition in Germany, watching an educational fi lm on how to use a condom for protection against AIDS. The film is from South Africa. One of the women at the lesson giggles and smiles shyly, as she pulls a condom over a wooden phallus. Her friends are in stitches and the situation exudes lust and powerlessness. I am watching the film, surrounded by happy German art lovers. But they are no longer looking at the film. They are looking at me with well-meaning expressions on their faces.
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- Dansk