HULDA RÓS GUÐNADÓTTIR

By approaching the documentation as an art work in itself with its own qualities and possibilities the work entered into a conversation with the narrative cinema documentary Keep Frozen. The relationship between the more narrative structure of a cinema movie with sitting down audiences and the spatial experience of an experimental video-installation was explored to the fullest. The work explores important topic of the medium. The art piece operates on the borders of four artistic/cinematic concepts (re)staging; re-en(act)ment, (re)presentation and (re)production.

What is (re)presentation?

What is (re)staging?

What is re-en(act)ment?

What is (re)production?

- in relation to reality/space/cinema.

During the days of 8th and 9th of January 2016 a 48-hour dock workers performance took place at Kunstkraftwerk in Leipzig, Germany, as part of the Keep Frozen series.

The artist asked the dock workers to move fish transport boxes around the space from one stack to the other. Performing the task in a similar way to what they usually do within the same time-frame but with a different motivation and context their experience of work becomes akin to creative labor, to choreographed movements in space.

Labor Move is a 3 channel video installation documenting the creative agency of the labour workers.

In Reykjavik harbour a group of dock workers work together unloading factory freezer trawlers of 25.000 boxes in 48 hours. The job hasn´t really been mechanized. They have to endure this task using almost only physical power in an endless repetition of movements where they move the boxes from one place to the next until the freezer compartment is empty and the container trucks full and gone away. The workers work without contracts and get paid for how fast they are which means their skills in working as synchronized machine is really put to the test.

In Labor Move we see those same dockworkers performing specifically for the camera, based on movements they have become accustomed to over a long period of time. The same movements are repeated, they throw heavy boxes from one place to another with considerable coordination and skill.

Labor Move is an art work in itself, but also a documentation in film and sound about the 48-hour performance of the dockers in front of viewers in an exhibition space in Leipzig in 2016. The 48-hour duration of the performance is the same time as the dockworkers usually have to unload the fish from a freezer trawler.

The film is the result of Gudnadóttir’s collaboration with the dockworkers which lasted for several years. Until recently, these same workers worked on the quayside, near Hafnarhús, and also appeared in her filmic work Keep Frozen.

The work poses questions about the relationships between these concepts and the cinematic reproduction of a spatial performance that in turn is a spatial reproduction of real life events.

 What is reality?

What is fiction?

What is re-staging or re-enactment?

How is the documentary a work of an author?

A fiction?

Where is the reality in abstraction?