Skog and Hegre at work comes into being during the exhibition period. Something has already happened: a visit to the manuscript collection at the National Library where we found what we were looking for: sketches for an unfinished manuscript about Giordano Bruno, written by Hans E. Kinck1.
The rest will happen over the course of three weeks at Lydgalleriet, we don't know what, except that there will be sound, lots of sound, hard work and ideas spread out in time and space. How these stories weave into Skog and Hegre at work is still uncertain, as Karen Skog and John Hegre create it during the exhibition period, and the public is invited into the process. Randi Nygård takes part in the exhibition, guest lecturing on the English savant Daniel Tammet and how his ideas on linguistics, perception and mathematics have inspired her work.
1 H. E. Kinck: Manuscripts and some letters, his writing folder and spectacles. Misc. is the title of one of the archive sections of the National Library of Norway. Amongst the manuscripts of Kinck is a draft of a never to be finished play about the nomad Giordano Bruno. This mathematician, astrologist, poet and mystic, was also a celebrated master of the art of memory, known for deploying «memory wheels» in order to hold knowledge about the infinity of the universe.
Some 300 years later, the wheels in turn inspired the art historian Aby Warburg to create the Mnemosyne-Atlas, in which he traces historical lines through recurring images, symbols and ideas in art and culture. However, the Atlas was never completed, suffering the same fate as Kinck’s play; the author died before it could be finished. The work of Bruno on memory was of crucial interest to both Warburg and Kinck, and notes about him fill the pages of their last diaries. The legacy of Warburg’s research would find its ground in his library around which the Warburg Institute was established. The library is arranged according to topics concerning man and knowledge and their place in the universe, formed by Warburg as «a laboratory of the mind» in his attempt to cure mankind’s narrow-mindedness and ignorance of its heritage.
The English historian Frances Yates later revisited Warburg’s ideas in her book The Art of Memory, a scientific history of the art of remembering spanning from its heyday in antiquity, via Bruno and occultism, to its ultimate influence on the fundamentals of modern science. Yates did not live long enough to witness the technology of today's Ars memoriae, which is entirely digital.
Kinck’s work was further taken up upon by one of his most committed disciples, Ingeborg Refling Hagen. She engaged her whole life in instigating moments of shared literary experience. During her internment in WWII for her antifascist convictions and illegal work she came to realise that the only things she had that could not be confiscated, were the books, poetry, stories and songs she had memorised from childhood. After her release, praising the mother of muses Mnemosyne, Hagen came to establish a new literary movement. Suttung was practiced through music and shared readings, memorising the literature, philosophy and myths, creating a living archive of cultural memory.
Skog and Hegre at work is the first instalment of LYDHØRT, commissioned by Lydgalleriet and curated by Signe Lidén.