NADJA ERICSSON

            

Vildanden  The Wild Duck        
2023,  video, 80 min    
text    text    text
 
Inspired by Henrik Ibsen’s 1884 play, ‘The Wild Duck’ is a family drama about language, memory, photography and vision. Shot in natural light with a handheld camera, the limitations of the camera apparatus become part of the film’s aesthetics and extend the theme of imagery, both photographic andlinguistic, within the storyline. Set in a 19th century cottage with period drama costumes, an anachronistic layer is present, as later periods have left their mark on the house, making time alternately specific and dissolved.

 


       



             


Sömndagboken   The Sleep Journal        
2024,  video, 42 min

med with  Karin Lindstén
musik av  music by  Ola Bergman

“Some images: dust, weariness, stones floating to the surface. I couldn’t sleep, so I went down to the birds. It was then that I realized: I was living in the double. Two moons become two eyelids that close. I don’t have much left to say. The stains suddenly turned into swans on dark water. I’ll never forget that. I still had a milk tooth left well into my teenage years. What else has happened? I wanted to tell you about the house, but I can’t remember the proportions. I wanted to tell you about the siblings, but I’ve read too many fairytales. Swan by day, human only by night. Eyes blurry with cataracts, pupils tear-shaped. I wanted to clean here, but the vacuum cleaner was broken.”

The Sleep Diary is a collaboration between artists Karin Lindstén and Nadja Ericsson. Materials from their respective archives have been woven together, themes have become visible, and a landscape for a new story has begun to take shape.



      




Än blommar lönnen aspen björken och alen V
2024,  fotografier  photographs

exhibited at Nordiska Konstförbundet,
with drawings by Frederikke Jul Vedelsby
                
 





Till Nadja   For Nadja
2023,   fotografier   photographs







Än blommar lönnen aspen björken och alen I
2020, video, 20 min

‘Still Bloom The Maple The Aspen The Birch And The Alder’ is a film diptych taking its starting point in the transformation of a psychiatric hospital, south of Stockholm – Långbro – into a housing area. The first film consists of still images, heavily cropped digital footage focusing on the visual elements that are common in real estate ads, such as windows, plants and light sources. In some cases, the very same apartments appear over and over again, in new versions, as they get sold anew. Over the footage, a monotonous voice is reading a list of descriptions from different locations, that alternately collides with — or contradicts the images. What the text is describing, is archival photographs from the site. At some points, the factual descriptions get interrupted by more literary fragments, taken from poems in a patient run publication. The other film is set outdoors, and repeats composition that are common in photos depicting Långbro, both in its state as hospital and as a housing area. Images and sounds leek between the films, creating a non-chronological journey through the depiction of a site where context and ideology has changed far more than architecture and interiors.







Ett vinfärgat hav   A Wine-colored Sea         
2019,  video, 7 min

At the bottom of the Baltic Sea lies thousands of naval mines left after the World Wars, threatening to detonate. The sea itself is also threatened by heavy pollution. By studying its changes, it is possible to predict what will happen to other oceans in the future. ‘A Wine-Colored Sea’ is a poetic and associative odyssey through the Baltic Sea where clearance divers are looking for mines, dolphins are thriving and where algal blooms are causing color shifts in the water. The film focuses on themes such as vision, illness, threats, and the gaps between description, depiction and experience. The visual material is showing techniques that are used to map the sea bottom for different reasons, and shows how these techniques are connecting different senses, as for instance, in sonar where sound gets translated into images. Through the text, an ambiguous ‘We’ is speaking — a collective underwater voice.







Anteckningar om en tallskog  
Notes on a pine forest         
2018,  video, 11 min

’Notes on a Pine Forest’ is based on films depicting military exercises on the Baltic Sea island Gotland, from the 1930s until today. Through montage, the film is following cinematic tropes in the source material, and studies its materiality and connotations. The voiceover is based on the french writer Francis Ponge’s poem ‘Le Carnet du Bois de Pins’ (1947). It also contains quotes from an online forum discussing military exercises and from instruction videos on how to paint pine forest and shoot war scenes. Ponge wrote his meta poem about the aesthetics of the pine forest during World War II, and as in his poem, the presence of war is here leaking through the nature imagery. Military drilling does, on one hand, need to be realistic enough to be useful as exercises, on the other hand, it needs to be fictive enough, not to reveal secret strategies. The armed forces’ own footage of their activities is often dominating media since they can decide to which extent journalists are allowed to participate. The exercises may also be seen as images of a sort, created to maintain terror balance, and despite being fictive they are sometimes seen as real threats. The work ‘Notes on a Pine Forest’ finds itself is this state between documentation and fiction, and between analysis and speculation.






Vildanden The Wild Duck
2023, video installation
made during a residency at Fabrikken, Copenhagen



Karins svanar Karin’s Swans
2024, oil pastel on paper





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kontakt  contact :  
nadjatoscaericsson (at) gmail.com