Then All Flesh It Is Like Grass
24th of August – 28th of September 2019, Kongsvinger Fortress, Norway, part of the group exhibition The Fortress, curated by Helga Marie Nordby and the Kongsvinger Art Society.
An installation piece consisting of a video projection, flowers and vegetables, hay, various vanitas symbols and soap bubbles.
The scene of my 2019 installation Then All Flesh It Is Like Grass was one of the casemates (vaulted chambers) at the Kongsvinger fortress, which dates back to 1673. My installation was inspired by the idea of the fragility of man and all living biological material. The fortress represented an important barrier to prevent Swedish invasion in the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, so it had always been fully operational, but unlike most military installations of the era, it quite uniquely never partook in any actual battle.
Soldiers in the 17th and 18th centuries were mostly young conscripts from nearby farms. Before the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century, Norwegian recruits were not given uniforms, meaning that they actually wore the poor clothing they brought with them from home.
The so-called casemates, constructed in the outer brick walls as basic cave-like chambers of various sizes, had a fireplace, a dirt floor and bunk beds. The bitter, damp cold, poor food and constant illnesses resulted in extremely high death rates, and according to military records from the 1690s, an estimated 20 men died of hunger and illness each year at the fortress of Kongsvinger.
The fortress`s history, and the fact that young conscripts were forced to live and die in these confined, damp and cold spaces under very poor living conditions, helplessly battling hunger and diseases, beg the question: What is a human life worth? And it invites reflection on the stages of life, from birth to death, when we all decompose and turn into soil.
Having tried to imagine how they must have led their lives, with death constantly lurking in the shadows, I decided that my installation had to express the transient, brief nature of life itself, a celebration of the beauty and glory of youth followed by a representation of the stench and cruelty of decay and death.
My installation consisted of two parts: a large main tableau filling two thirds of the space, and a smaller assemblage in one of the windowsills of the casemate.
The main tableau consisted of a large video projection in loop, depicting the decaying of original soldier photographs dating from the 1890s to the 1940s that were placed in tanks of water and chlorine. The video footage captured how the images slowly dissolved and disappeared, accompanied by a complex soundtrack consisting of cacophonous mumbling of male voices and various types of human breath heard on the deathbed.
The projection was surrounded by a large amount of vases, vessels, baskets and trays containing huge amounts of flowers and vegetables. A soap bubble machine placed inside the fireplace produced bubbles that filled the air and burst as they hit the ground.
The smaller tableau prepared on the windowsill was a display of typical vanitas and memento mori symbols as seen in the vanitas paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as seashells, corals, a blown-out candle, an hour glass, small framed portraits, and decaying fruits and flowers.
During the course of the exhibition period, about five weeks, all the flowers and vegetables slowly decayed and rotted, producing a penetrating odour of decay inside the casemate. When the installation was disassembled on September 28th, the humidity had accelerated the process of composting, so everything had rotted completely. What remained of what in the beginning was bursting with life and freshness, was a ghostly atmosphere, a grey and sad emptiness, the remains of life that had departed.
Exhibition views from the opnening 24th of August 2019
Exhibition views from the last day 28th of September 2019
Documentation of installation piece, Then all flesh it is like Grass, 2019
