Premiere
In collaboration with Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA).
“I guess you have a lot of questions. I do – I have so many questions. Questions that become one and get tangled into their voices. Their answers are not answering my questions – my questions don’t want them to answer. Still, I want to listen to them, a conversation where you don’t have to say anything, you just have to be there, you can listen or you can sleep. You can let the words become part of your unconscious, your dreams, or you can try to stay awake. The fragments of languages, Spanish, Ayuujk, English and Norwegian, will be unpredictable, but full. This is our reality, and you are welcome into it, not to try to understand but to get an ungraspable insight.”
You are invited to spend a night alone in a hotel room, accompanied by the voices and texts of the linguist and activist Yasnaya Elena A. Gil and the journalist and writer Sigrun Slapgard. The soundscape and texts are triggered by conversations Maritea had with these two women that she admires and wanted to listen deeply to. Their conversations centred around the word ‘solidarity’ – a word to be questioned, squeezed, loved and rejected, hand in hand by the sculpture Hun som bærer minnet om denne jorda, hvor bærer denne jorda henne? (She who Carries the Memory of this Earth, Where does this Earth Carry Her?), made by Maritea’s mother Gitte Dæhlin. Gitte Dæhlin’s sculpture can be viewed as part of the exhibition Actions of Art and Solidarity at Kunstnernes Hus. “The sculpture begs us not to describe her, to not make her answer any questions, but we will ask, we ask and ask, but never expect her to answer, we respect her silence. Still, we want her to be there for us, to save us, to fill a silence.”
Maritea Dæhlin (1986) is an interdisciplinary artist who alternates between living and working in Norway and Mexico. Her work includes performance, text, video and sound installation and has been shown at venues and festivals in Europe, Latin America and North America. In 2020, she presented the critically acclaimed performance I WANT TO BE TRADITIONAL here at the theater. Maritea is one of Black Box teater’s associated artists in the period of 2020–2021.