Text for the exhibition "BON: Dawid + CAGE RAGE: Linda Bergman". Text by Emilia Alvarez Nordström.
My friend; I do not know what to write about. So I will write about that day.
We went to the studio by car and it was fall. Getting into that backseat made me feel like I was twelve again, sitting there small and alone, full of melancholia, unable to separate my emotions from the weather outside. I don’t know why but I felt uncomfortable; fall always brings out feelings of emptiness, of letting go, and each year it is equally surprising; as if the world has secretly sighed during the night, relaxing so much that everything held up by the vibrant strength of summer slipped off it and fell silently to the ground. I think it was the feeling of the past, my childhood here, during those first few years when the most palpable differences were not those seen in people, customs or myself, but in the landscape that surrounded me – the changes it underwent and how it differed from my home. There is nothing here that makes me more aware of my foreignness than the detachment from nature, how each year it lets go of us, sheds the traits that usually define it revealing a calm silence, and causing a longing for my own country, the soil that cradled me and that I miss as if it were a person. I did not know where we were going, but eventually we got there. We parked in an unknown part of town, standing for a while in that grey, grey parking lot. We went in through doors, up some stairs, locking things behind us, into the heat of a room, walked over Persian rugs, put bags on leather couches, saw desks along the windows, and little cars in a cabinet safe. Off with jacket, past all of the desks and to an open space at the end of the room, on the side one wall was lined with masses of photographic equipment and the other saw the end of the row of windows. There on the floor were the pictures.
-“Here on the floor are these…”
-”And over here are these others…”
-”Can you tell what these are?” (Tiny elongated shadows of people? A cryptic number 33?)
-“It’s television static.”
Now after, I think how casual, how cavalier with the wave of an arm, the pointing of a finger, I was directed to the pictures on the floor, but for a split second in the silence of my company, in that cavalier arm movement, I saw, I felt, I sensed, I heard through that straight posture, through the distance you created by walking away: “that’s actually my voice on the floor”. I looked at one picture and then the other, moved around and looked at one and then another, looked closer and stepped back, looked around. I saw them there on the floor; I walked away and back to the leather couch, looked in books but thought of nothing, “what to write, what to write, what to write?”, talked a little, then some more,
-“Will there be questions..?” someone asked in their head.
-“Take this book, and this book”, pacing back and forth on the Persian rugs, and then it was time to leave.
-“One last glance at the pictures first”, so again past the desks with the small tools and smalls cars, to the open space where they lay. To look one more time at the broken cages, more like lines now, indescribable, and one more look at the clusters of twigs among the branches. Alone there now I couldn’t stop my heart from breaking, but I could hold a straight face. I am not sure what came over me but standing there made me sad, made me feel the skin on my arms and the back of my neck.
I think there was a sentiment in the images – all of them – that appealed to the part of my heart that never mends; that never did mend after that first fall. In some way it is not just the landscape that sheds it’s foliage, everything during autumn, even us, falls down, revealing what is always there – the cradled nest, the broken cage ignoring the spaces between, exhausted after a summer of trying to make out the sun behind the leaves, allowing for the bare structures to speak for themselves not through sounds or associations but through the palpability conveyed in their bareness, allowing to let yourself go, expose your arms to the fresh air and be alone in a white room. This is all that is left, a twisted shape whose simplicity and clarity I recognize but cannot articulate, vulnerable exposure of something that has no voice.
We gathered our things and went on our way, with books in bag and gloves in hand, out the door and down the stairs.