Text by John Peter Nilsson
His euphoric and excited recollections are interspersed with feelings of guilt and shame. This and the rambling, seemingly helpless aeroplane creates a feeling that something is out of control – perhaps the person behind the joystick or the technology of the aeroplane.
In fact, this double coding is what characterises Maria Heimer Åkerlund’s work. She provides machines with human attributes, partly in an attempt to probe the mass media filter through which human beings, actions and events, in a paradoxical way, may appear as unreal signs. In a sense, the media’s reporting becomes more important than what it reports. And partly in order to conduct a critical discussion on power. What exactly occurs in a process that starts with the conception of an idea in a human brain and ends up as a high-tech machine? The development of the atom bomb did not only result in the deadliest weapon produced by humankind. Nuclear power can be viewed as a “clean” alternative to environmentally harmful energy sources such as oil and coal. Of course, both applications may be perceived as potentially threatening to humanity. However, it is not the technology itself that poses a threat, but the application of it. The threat comes from humanity itself.
In 2002 Maria Heimer Åkerlund visited the aircraft boneyard AMARC and the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, USA, in search of another approach to the way in which the war machine is depicted by the media. Instead of being bowled over by the drama of war and begin depicting the number of aircraft carriers stationed in a particular bay or another, she wanted to film the everyday life of the war machine. Needless to say, it was no accident that she chose a location for retired and amputated aircraft that have been deprived of their meaning. To a higher degree than before, she wanted to focus on the human aspect of the war machine.
The result was the twelve-minute video, “Fun in the Air”, completed in 2004. During her stay on the air base she was struck by the movie star status of the pilots, not unlike that of their fictional counterparts in the Hollywood blockbuster Top Gun. For this reason, she wanted to highlight certain similarities between reality and fiction by using her documentary material in the spirit of sentimentalised American war films.
In the seven-minute video diptych, “Exercise”, from 2005, she shows, perhaps more explicitly than before, the human role in the war machine. The starting point of the video is a military drill. The first panel shows a group of soldiers receiving instructions from a professional choreographer. On the second panel we see a group of dancers receiving instructions from a drill captain of the Stockholm K1 regiment. The choreographer and the captain created their choreographies based on the same piece of music composed by Lars Åkerlund.
When Heimer Åkerlund translates the video diptych to a performance work, the physical presence is further accentuated. Two groups of dancers were instructed by two choreographers using the same music. As in the video diptych, it is not only about how the same prerequisites (the music) can be interpreted in different ways, but about parallel similarities and dissimilarities in the patterns of movement between the two choreographies. The first group comprises professional dancers, choreographed by Captain Johan Wennerholm (and rehearsed by Françoise Joyce). The second group comprises young non-dancers, choreographed by Maria Heimer Åkerlund herself.
By contrasting a razor-sharp and professionally efficient military choreography with a “civilian” attempt, a complex visual experience is created. Perhaps a contradictory experience? But in such case, it is a contradiction that may also be experienced within an individual. It becomes particularly apparent in the result of the military drill which is to train someone to kill. Maria Heimer Åkerlund raises an existential question about how to reconcile the fact that one may destroy someone else’s family in order to protect one’s own.