METTE EDVARDSEN

In fairytales the clever child always brings breadcrumbs, wise princes a woollen thread to find their way home. It’s a matter of socialization. Children and others should want to find their way back. The breadcrumb is for adults like visits to the psychoanalyst. A thread we one day, proudly, can follow back to its origin and think, “Gosh, I have improved so much!” Psychoanalysis can only find out for you what society wants you to be.

Travelling with the aid of maps will only take you to places that you could already visit. Cartography implies to make a landscape, or anything that can be introduced into a grid, neutral territory. To rob a bank is only a matter of technical precision from the moment you’ve got hold of its architectural drawings. That’s why the attic always is the most exiting place; there’s no map. On attics we are all explorers.

Freud confesses to his readers in “Das Unheimliche” that he involuntarily returned no less than three times during the same afternoon to the red light district of the unknown city he visited. Freud was probably not the clever child or he would have brought his breadcrumbs. But he did, it was just that they, read representation, wanted him to return to exactly where he could already have been.

Mette Edvardsen’s work begins where Freud gets worried, where the uncanny has ceased to be a state of exception. On the outskirts of maps, on the part that has been folded so many times nothing seems left. She gathers the breadcrumbs, wipes out the site of departure and creates an acronym for
Far Far Away, or Close Up. In her labyrinth the Ariadne-thread is wireless and the Minotaur an aging architect whose angles never were straight.

In both “Private Collection” and “Time will Show” the motif is to produce the possibility for a space, respectively a time, without coordinates. A space and a time that has always been here, around us, or somewhere next door, it is just that it was forgotten or not useful anymore. Spaces and times that are yet to be captured and named by representation, and actually don’t exist not even for us as we experience their unknowingly complex polygonal structure unfold in front of us in all directions without goals, back and forth without dimensions.

To experience Mette Edvardsen’s work is to know that you are but not where, and certainly not when. It is to be given a moment of the new, of the self. Something that can occur only where we don’t know.

Mårten Spångberg