All adults have had a childhood of some sort, but the ability to describe the past – to raise private experience to a universal plane – is rare. The family album is usually irrelevant, other than as a history of fashion, when the third generation takes over.
In the novel suite In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust takes a bite of Madeleine cake, and evokes an entire life, the end of the previous century in the French upper class. And under the perpetual sun of Algiers, Albert Camus paints an unforgettable portrait of the author as a fatherless boy in The First Man.
Memory is subjective and generates urgent expressions when the experience has ripened. The degree of autobiography varies: strictly speaking, Edgar Degas need not have taken one ballet step in order to sculpt his dancers, bronzes in tulle skirts; to the viewer, the important thing is whether the result is convincing. It is a matter of finding the exact expression. Putting the dot in the right place.
That’s how Eva Koch works.
On a large scale
Together with landscape architects, Eva Koch has produced several public artworks. Something to see – or ignore – en route between city and village, landscapes modelled with precision and an exact sense of scale. That Eva Koch spent part of her childhood in the Faeroe Islands has in all likelihood served as a tuning fork when she creates her large-scale artworks. The islands lie between heaven and ocean, the large sculptures balance earth with air.
At the Södertörns högskola near Stockholm, we find her video installation Crowds. Here wandering people flow towards the viewer in an incessant stream. Jerusalem, Bombay and Hong Kong – the sequences shift rhythmically: street noise and crowding, no one sees, everyone just walks on. Why do not any encounters arise in this sea of people? Then the noise dies down, some people stop, seeking out the viewer’s gaze, intrusively, impertinently, inquisitively, before returning after a short pause to the anonymous crowd. Crowds – far from the sparsely populated Faeroes and the Spanish mountainous regions where Eva Koch’s mother comes from.
From the plaza back to the family album
At Moderna Museet Eva Koch steps away from the gigantic video projections she is currently completing for the Sickla estate in Stockholm. From video to colour slide, from the plaza to the family album, “where it all began”. Inside the white cube the atmosphere can again be condensed: a terseness, a presence, a “one-to-one” encounter. En face is the title of the work, and it is truly a face-to-face meeting with the Faeroe cliffs, sea and skies. It is also a frontal confrontation with the Spanish mountain farmers in her mother’s birthplace, and with children who were children fairly long ago. Taken from the family album, but sorted, selected and handed over for us to see: “yes, the artist could be standing there, but I could also be in her place…” In Spain. Between Heaven and Sea, Portraits – in the light of two worlds, Spain and the Faeroes, childhood becomes a third, uniting, world. Against a backing track of surging water, we hear the muted clicking of slides being fed through the projector, endlessly “in search of lost time”.
Ann-Sofi Noring
With thanks to IASPIS.
