sudurlandsvegur

Suðurlandsvegur

Suðurlandsvegur

May 19th, 2012. A petrol station with a diner along Suðurlandsvegur, Iceland.

In a corner of the room is a man drinking coffee. He is shabby, troubled, and

he wears an elegant but dusty and somewhat ragged coat.

[He gets up and walks over to a spotlight, plugs it in and returns to his place.

Remains standing. A few moments of silence.]

It was a group, an investigative body … Not, like I know has been

claimed, a shapeless and nomadic organization. As a matter of fact it

was a very simple and quite primitive alternative …

[Without any greater effort lifts his index finger:]

… and in theory … a fairly well-functioning alternative … Of course,

they also had the ambition to build something more advanced … and

they were well on their way to …

[Walks back and forth. Frowning.]

Here … in a job like this … if you want to create autonomy … you have

to avoid too much instrumentalization … that’s what they tried to do …

[Stops, turns to the audience. Sarcastically:]

… but what good is an institution that has neither power nor money?

Only a fool would claim it lasts in the long run …

In any case, you have to question your form and existence … and it’s an

important part of the work: not stopping … not settling …

[To the audience, in confidence:]

Above all, it’s important to say it …

[Pause. Like a conductor standing still with arms raised, turned to the

orchestra, just as it is about to begin. Eyes wide open.]

But then …

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Notes

1. (A) [p.5] I had taken the habit of spending the nights

in an office space that was empty of people from ear-

ly evening until the morning. As long as I didn’t leave

any traces there was no reason to worry about my

presence being noticed. I thought about it like an of-

fice job with a strict time schedule. It is one of the first

nights, past midnight I think, I sit in the archive read-

ing a magazine when the lights on the entire floor

are turned on. I hear footsteps, someone walking

back and forth as though searching for something, a

tinkling noise. Then, I look up just to catch him when

he swiftly passes by with the mop along the corridor.

I would like to believe that there was some form of

mutual understanding in that first encounter while

in reality his gaze was completely indifferent to my

presence. He wasn’t even surprised. It took a long

time before we got to know each other, even longer

before I was accepted as one of them.

2. (A) [p.6] Cleaning means to clear a space from dirt

and put things in order. Cleaning is often performed

with the help of cleaning agents and everything from

simple tools such as dusters, brushes and brooms,

to electrical machines. Cleaning is a routine em-

ployment that includes vacuum cleaning, dusting,

wiping off walls and edgings, scrubbing floors,

cleaning kitchens, bathrooms, toilets and sinks.

Cleaning also includes emptying waste bins, pol-

ishing mirrors, windows and furniture, to shake the

cloths, curtains, carpets and other interior textiles,

and sometimes operations such as washing up the

dishes. To create order in a space means that you

also make sure that all movable objects are put in

place: chairs are organised around a table, cushions

are shaken and neatly ordered on a couch, books,

china and glasses are placed in shelves and cup-

boards, clothes are organised on hangers. It is also

important to separate between the regular cleaning

routines and the more thorough cleaning where you

move heavier furniture and other objects in order to

reach surfaces and spaces that cannot normally be

accessed.

3. (A) [p.6] To organise an efficient cleaning organ-

isation it is often necessary to specify how to con-

trol and perform the cleaning. There are many ways

to design such a contract (more or less formal). In

the following are three examples of how cleaning

contracts are set up. One way is to make a work

specification document. First you specify where to

clean and how often, then you go into detail about

what to clean and how. Such a specification might

be a good model for smaller organisations where

there is close communication between cleaner

and employer. There is however a risk of estab-

lishing an inefficient and inflexible agreement that

delegates cleaning where it is not needed but on

the other hand doesn’t cover a temporarily bigger

need. Sometimes it might not be motivated to clean

a room if for example someone has been ill or on

holidays, and sometimes more cleaning is required

due to season or activities that cause a lot of dirt and

disorder. Another way of designing the contract is to

specify a “quality level” for each space. The quality

is defined in accordance to the level of cleanliness,

based on a standard. Naturally, the use of such

standards requires regular inspections. The benefit

of this model is that it strives to guarantee a quality

in terms of result. A problem, especially for small-

er organisations, is that someone needs to manage

and control the cleaning regularly, which of course

also requires a thorough knowledge of the stand-

ard. It is also important to specify how frequently the

standard must be attained. A third alternative would

be a combination of the above two models where

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it is the cleaner that has the responsibility to esti-

mate how much cleaning is required. It is necessary

to still have some basic work specification but it is

the cleaner that determines what, where and when

cleaning is needed. This is often combined with

more thorough inspections by both employer and

cleaner and continuous communication about the

quality. Needs-based cleaning is however depend-

ant on competent cleaners with enough experience

to make efficient estimations and plans.

4. (A) [p.7] See Rosalind Williams, Notes on the

Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and

the Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The

MIT Press, 1990).

5. (A) [p.8] “In the post-Hegelian world the bound-

ary that once separated Fall from Abfall, fact from

garbage, was no longer easily drawn. Whereas in

Hegel’s time data that were deemed worthy of enter-

ing the archive of culture had been limited to those

that reflected in some way the systematic workings

of the Weltgeist, now literally everything—including

Abfall, which in German means both ‘garbage’ and

‘hearsay’—was considered historical and thus wor-

thy of being archivized, preserved, documented.”

Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008).

6. (A) [p.9] How much life has changed and how un-

changed it has remained at bottom. I recall the time

when I was still sharing the preoccupations of the

office, an official among officials, and find on closer

examination that from the very beginning I sensed

some sort of discrepancy, some little maladjustment,

causing a slight feeling of discomfort which not even

the most important assignment could eliminate.

7. (A) [p.10] Like the underground’s underground.

8. (O) [p.19] As the patient began to show signs of

recovery from what had been thought to be a chron-

ic catatonia beyond all hope of cure, one of the first

peculiarities that the doctors noticed—they were

a team of doctors, all very distinguished—was the

patient’s hand moving as if it were holding a pen,

writing. For a long time this was the only obvious

change in the patient’s condition, the body still as

petrified as ever and the eyes staring into thin air.

Among the doctors was a young Vietnamese wom-

an who had recently become a widow. She recog-

nized her own displaced sorrow in the patient’s

frozen, muted being and in the manic movement of

the hand. And it was she who suggested they put a

pen in his hand, and some paper in the other. When

scrawl and seemingly random lines and dots gradu-

ally turned into letters, words and sentences, as you

know, and eventually became readable even for the

group of doctors, she sat in her chamber at night

and read the notes with the same sensibility and

delicate judgment as when she had carefully exam-

ined the evolution of lines and squiggles into text on

the first few hundred or so papers, quietly sipping

on a glass of red wine, in grief.

Her husband, the collaborator, the dreamer, threw

himself into a garbage press in Cuiabá, taking his

masterpiece with him, an anthropological study on

the “interpenetration of the vegetal, animal and ge-

ological” among some newly Christianized indige-

nous tribe.

My beloved Dũng,

How does your work proceed? Will you be

finished by May as you said?

I dreamed that my white coat was made of feathers,

and that I couldn’t take it off unless I first took it on.

The error was very hard to diagnose.

I wanted to run away but I just stood there.

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I knew exactly what to do.

What do you think, my little squirrel?

And by the way, the catatonic guy still

has not moved.

I guess maybe I was him in my dream?

When will you come to Europe? Are you

not fed up with the jungle?

Please come soon!

I kiss you.

9. (F) [p.20] [Script—manuscript—immanence]

A document written by hand is a manuscript. The

actor copies the script by hand, and so he writes the

manuscript, determined to inhabit the foreign lan-

guage (notice the “Icelandic touch” on the curves of

the “a”) and make it constructive for the performance.

It is all very simple: The manual labor of copy-

ing, the writing of the manuscript, serves as pas-

sage to the moment when the script is performed,

transformed into the language and the gestures of

the role. He engages in this first phase of rehearsal,

listening to the differences between the script and

the coming performance. He re-hears the script a

second and a third time, listening to the movements,

gestures, utterances and scenes that constitute the

future performance.

The repetitive copying doesn’t end in a perfect circle

or a restoration of the script; writing writes to es-

cape the text as text and to transform it into some-

thing that cannot only be read, and that can only

be read through the role. This is a main point: The

copying of the manuscript as the first phase of the

rehearsal means the transformation of the subject

as well as of the meaning of the text: The document

is now becoming prop. Actually, the manuscript will

eventually become the role’s main companion in the

performance of the monologue Suðurlandsvegur.

It will be the object that the role relates to, some-

times reads from but most of the time only holds in

his hands, searches for or puts back into his pockets.

On the sheets of paper the role finds suggestions

for more or less all the scenes: He will be in the

lines, vowels and gestures. At the same time these

sheets make up the privileged object of his gestures

and his being. Thus, to copy and rehearse the script

through the making of the manuscript is also to lis-

ten to the script’s becoming-prop-for-the-role, and it

is in between these parallel processes that the role

will unfold; between the manuscript as the matrix of

his gestures and the manuscript as the prop that the

gestures treat, handle and relate to. Hence, he can

only read the text through his gestures, in what he

is doing—in being the role—and as the tension be-

tween the manuscript (the matrix of his actions) and

the manuscript (the object extension and counterpart

of his act). This is the struggle which theatricality is

made of. It is a trap, but a trap wherein the role can

maneuver in free space and in which he will time

and time again clash against the opacity of the ob-

ject, the ‘objective’ result of the process that birthed

him—the document, his roll, the role’s double.

Now and then, as he glimpses down into the manu-

script, he recognizes someone else’s unfamiliar

handwriting, and suddenly he remembers the out-

side world, as if there were an author or director.

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Suðurlandsvegur:

Performed at Litla Kaffistofan, Iceland,

on May 19, 2012, by Hilmar Guðjónsson.

Written and directed by Fredrik Ehlin,

Andjeas Ejiksson, Oscar Mangione.

Editors:

Fredrik Ehlin (F), Andjeas Ejiksson (A),

Oscar Mangione (O)

Graphic design:

Andjeas Ejiksson

Contact:

[email protected]

ISBN: 978-91-980703-0-9

GEIST PUBLISHING

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GEIST PUBLISHINGISBN: 978-91-980703-0-9

sudurlandsvegur

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