camille norment studio

“I do not know what to make of you,” she said.
“Could you be an otherlander?  You seem from another world, or even another species.”
She paused and looked, but not deeply into my eyes.
“Yes,” she concluded.  “I have to say that you are truly alien to me.” (1)

Through a tunnel of luminant  darkness, a player enters a game space.  This space is a mirror’s reflection of familiar things, structures, and bodies captured in a moment that hovers out of time; the player is wrapped in the comfort of being lost in the place of lost objects. The inhabitants themselves are in stasis, and yet move like predictable chaos, in a silence that glares with a sentient noise. The player’s skin absorbs a thickness from the air’s exhale.  It is the breath of the wish that cannot be fulfilled.

This zone is ‘a hollow’, an abandonment coiled in the contradictory desire of emptying-out and self-fulfillment.  It speaks most decisively to the working mechanisms of a heterotopic psychic machine.  The illusion conceals an endless churning of gears, moaning of motors, and buzzing of networks which labor timelessly towards a work that can never be completed. The player comes to understand the rules and becomes a seeker of “the ultimate lost object” (2) – a seeker of the self.

“This is not a dream-sequence, I am here,” concludes the player,  “this place does exist, and so must the prize”.  Through the pronouncement of its true existence, the player who concludes against the option of the hallucination forfeits the first and shortest path to paradise.  The prize, in this space, is but an ideal, one that cannot exist except within the fantasy of the mind, or the promise of the game.  The player looks from behind the eyes for direction.

A pocket fills with smooth round jewels that tantalize the fingers towards the mouth; a picnic table overflows with vessels of elixir; a rose vine twists its thorns around a fence, forming a stairway to the other side; a beckoning swing disappears in half-oscillation, looping in and out of a half-hidden memory.  Make a wish in small doses - the anomalies offer clues.  But beware, this game is built upon traps.

And so the player continues.

A journey through the labyrinth: its passages, its turns, the visible and invisible layers;   move into buildings and rooms.  Absorbed by the shifting walls and squeezed down to the very center: a well, a grotto – the wishing cave itself.  When you must go down, go down to the deepest well. (3)   Stay there until you become something else. The player, fearing the reflection of shadows, ponders whether to avoid this place, or to enter and play. 

We play.

The enclosure reverberates with the presence of those who have entered before.  The player searches the walls for traces, but they are stubborn in their deflection of meaning.  The collective utterance is collapsed into an inaudible tone that animates in visible forms.  All possibilities, all of life itself occurs in the pause between the sound of two falling drops. (4)  Listen.

Yet, amidst the spiraling roar of suspended time, there exists a piercing through the wall seeking to penetrate the lingering body and carry it beyond to the next level.  
“How long will it take?”  wonders the player, before unleashing a laughter wise with the absurdity of the question. 

And another drop falls.

In this game, the player can enter and exit at will - most return to the last time played.  All comings and goings are sheathed in a light beyond violet, collapsing the royal bloodlines into glowing extracts of eyes and teeth; the bruise is saturated by the hue, and for a moment, has disappeared.  A union of the strongest opposites, it is the ideal color and acknowledges its place within the gift of mystic delusion.  
Found again in this dark passage, more and less illuminated, the player meditates within the transition and wears the color on the body.

Camille Norment, 2007

1 Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2007), p. 119.  Jameson’s chapter “The Alien Body”, opens with an intriguing description of the “four orders of foreignness” recognized by the Nordic languages.

2  Jameson, p.74.  Chapter 6 in general, “How to Fulfill a Wish”, offers an interesting perspective on the precarious nature of wish fulfillment.

3 Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (London:  Vintage, 2003). The concept of a well as a place of seeking, contemplation, and transition is a theme integrated throughout the novel.

4 Tor Ulven Samlede Dikt, ed. Morten Moi (Norway: Gyldendal, 2000).  See in particular, the 
section, “Musikken kan vente”, p177 – 188, in which the poems speak existentially of the cave and the passage of time between water drops.  For example, p. 186:

XVI
Når dråpen
løsner

og treffer deg

blir du
borte

In 2007, Camille Norment was one of three artists invited to produce a work that responds to the enclosed ‘transitory compound’ of Sundholm in Copenhagen. Sundholm was built in 1908 as a hospital and forced-labor institution for alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and convicted criminals. More recently, a temporary kindergarten, and an art and design center have been added to the list. Visitors entering this astoundingly heterotopic environment are enveloped by an architectural environment that has not changed since 1908. The experience becomes even more surreal when navigating the streets and encountering small clusters of the compounds inhabitants engaged in various laborious or illicit activities.

This science-fantasy narrative describes the experience of ‘a player’ who navigates the Sundholm compound.

See also installations The Hollow - Wishing Cave and The Hollow - Beyond Violet.