invite

We would warmly like to invite You to

Opening Doors- project’s performance at Iceland Academy of Arts/Drama Department, Sölvhólsgata 13, 24.4. 18:00

Opening Doors is a performance laboratory- concept, initiated by artist Maija Hirvanen (FIN). It’s currently worked at Iceland Academy of Arts, Reykjavik, Iceland as a part of Hirvanen’s 4- months NordScen/Nordic Resort- residency. The artists included are Árni Kristjánsson, Hannes Óli Ágústsson, Maija Hirvanen, Stefán Benedikt Vilhelmsson. Árni, Hannes and Sfefán are students at the Art Academy. After Reykjavik the project will continue (and change) in different places, next in Helsinki and Stockholm.

Opening Doors is led by ideas, observations and actions around the subject of doors. It's about the body's relation to architecture, history- and the present. It's about the social, poetical and imaginary functions of doors, the methaphors of entrance and exit, control and division. It's also about what each of the participants make it to be.

At the performance on 24.4., Árni, Hannes and Stefán will present their solos as part of Opening Doors. After the performance there will be a talk about the project and about doors. Before the performances Maija presents some work on video and talks about process- based art environments.

17:00 videos and talking by Maija
18:00 performances by Árni, Hannes and Stefán
19:00 talk about doors and Opening Doors

Contact Maija for more info maija@perceptionscore.net
tel. 6913732
http://openingdoorsreykjavik.blogspot.com

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About the performance on 24.4.2007:

Stefán
Benedikt Vilhelmsson says:

A TALE OF TWO DOORS.

If we go through it together we are likely to have a similar experience. Like if we both look at the same picture, our minds are
stimulated by the same source material. Every time we collectively experience something we can come to a (more or less) collective conclusion. Wouldn´t it be interesting to
have a whole room of people go through the same performance, and when
they come out, none of them experienced the same show? Then lets talk.

Hannes Óli Ágústsson says:

Mirror?
Door to the self.
A doorway?
Liminal space.
Hell?
Our own creation.
A door?
Our own perspective.

I’m a 2nd year acting student and have mainly been working with the concept of the gates of hell, and how we as human beings are creators of our own personal hell. I’ve been working with a variety of material, drawing both from classical literature (Dante, Shakespeare), popular culture (Wikipedia, R.E.M) and theoretical writing, mainly the works of french psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and its representation in the modern man.


Maija Hirvanen says:

When travelling in a warm country, one might notice this: the doors of the folk are open. You see inside peoples homes. There, the children are watching television, someone cooks, folds sheets.

Some other moment You put your tumb up and wait. It’s getting hotter and hotter, the air is waving above the black asfalt. The sand flies as the trucks pass by the road. You put your tumb up and hope to get there. Hallucinations in the heat, Willem Dafoe talks to you from far, small insects on shoulders. Water in the bottle is boiling. Then, a car. It stops. The door opens (and other stories).


Árni Kristjánsson says:

Sliding doors feel like a practical idea for the masses. You enter automaticly, no questions involved. I think some sliding doors should be considered unlucky…now, can a sliding door feel insecure? …the door constantly hides, still it is transparent, has nothing to show. When you get closer, it moves.

The door tried to do it’s job but it’s talent did not seem appropriate…

Attic Actions/At Homes

Written earlier: ' When travelling in a warm country, one might notice this: the doors of the folk are open. You see inside peoples homes. There, the children are watching television, someone cooks, folds sheets.'

Inside homes, people sometimes play performance artists. The walls are thick and it's too cold to keep the doors open. A home in Reykjavik, at the attic

'And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative; that even when it is forever expunged from the present, when, henceforth, it is alien to all the promises of the future, even when we no longer have a garret, when the attic room is lost and gone, there remains the fact that we once loved a garret, once lived in an attic.'

Gaston Bachelard, 'The Poetics of Space'

Oh the writing in solitude, inside doors! Oh the collective attic!

10 days of Reykjavik left

It's 10 days left of Reykjavik and the mind is gathering something for now. So something about doors? Climsing at files, texts, images, notes- a door in Kirkenes, shot in June 2006, thinking of being in Reykjavik and of Opening Doors.

workshopping on Friday 23rd to prepare a work-in-progress- presentation at Prototype 108- event on Sunday 25th March. Quest observers to the work were Barbro Smeds and Kent Sjöström. things are starting to land on their places, in my opinion- in couple of hours presenting again at Skeifan- area of the city.

6th March Stefan gives a workshop within workshopping and takes the listener through a set of rooms- eyes closed, listening and imagining...

in the dark

workshopping on the 6th March:

Árni, recorder, dark room and a 1-1 performance situ.