María Dalberg’s film Uncontainable Truth (2021) investigates the fate of Icelandic working women in the 16th-19th century. These women performed hard labour. They walked kilometers over frozen landscapes to beat and scrub their master’s clothes, cared for grazing animals in all weather conditions, and performed other strenuous physical tasks. They belong to subaltern classes of illiterate and landless people tied to the land.
Dulsmál are criminal cases in which a woman hides her pregnancy and the birth of her child. The child either dies of exposure to the elements or negligence. Two Icelandic laws were formalized in 16th-17th century. These laws say that every woman that kills her child should get the death penalty, even if she claims to have borne a lifeless child.
Dalberg works with embodied history to channel the words of women that have been lost. Dalberg’s film is taken from 5 testimonies of 16th-19th century women and aims to give them back the voices that they were consistently denied, the film brings their names to light through spoken stories recorded in old manuscripts and other contemporary sources.
Àngels Miralda Àngels Díaz Miralda Tena
Erin Honeycutt wrote an article on this work, published in Berlin Art Link.
https://www.berlinartlink.com/2021/07/06/maria-dalberg-kuenstlerhaus-bethanien-solo-exhibition-review/
Extra
The main sources I used while working on Uncontainable truth are:
Már Jónsson, Dulsmál 1600-1900, Már Jónsson bjó til prentunnar,
Sagnfræðistofnun Háskóla Íslands, Háskólaútgáfan, 2000.
Alþingisbækur Íslands 1570-1800 IX, Reykjavík.
Alþingisbækur Íslands 1570-1800 XI, Reykjavík.
Alþingisbækur Íslands 1570-1800 VIII, Reykjavík.
ÞÍ (Þjóðskjalasafn Íslands)Sýsl. Eyjafj. IVb-22, bl. 17r-39r; Ka. 177: 13. og 21. janúar 1847.
Two poets duet. H.C. Andersen and Grímur Thomsen, a melodic and mesmerizing sound poem performance by María Dalberg. Her writings reveal questions on national identity and the role of an artist as a cultural icon. She collaborated with the electronic musician Anton Kaldal.
Cycle Music Art Festival commissioned the performance, performed at Gerðarsafn- Kópavogur Art Museum in 2018. This year festival - titled "Inclusive Nation" dealt with questions such as the heritage of Danish Colonialism and national identity. The festival took place in the context of the 2018 centenary of Icelandic sovereignty. Cur. Guðný Guðmundsdóttir, Sara S. Öldudóttir and Jonatan Habib Enqvist.
BUZZ (2018)
Solo show at Reykjavík Art Museum
Curated by Edda Halldórsdóttir.
Soundscape Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir.
María Dalberg’s film Buzz (2018) reckons with humanity’s immersion in the immediate environment. Landscape has always been a subject of poetry, painting, and philosophy. Dalberg’s work records and analyses the prolonged effects of landscape on the mind through experiments in language, poetry, and visuals. The language and scenery collaged together form an immersive landscape that describe a process of being-with the land and the sublimity of these vast expanses.
Buzz is a work contingent on Dalberg’s home landscape of Iceland - a unique view of volcanic seascapes with rugged contours. The black basalt rocks resound against an orange setting sun that contrasts with more typical shades of icy blue. With this colour palette, Dalberg proposed to create a landscape recognisable and uncanny – as though from a faraway world.
The origin of the work lies halfway across the world in the Galapagos Islands. An archipelago which is a geologic parallel to Iceland from the point of volcanic formation but unrecognisable in its plant and animal diversity. Walks were performed across both islands with the intent of finding the differences between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Through these experiments, Dalberg found patterns that emerged in her sensations according to the factors of mood, weather, and landscape.
The resulting text is a spoken poem that melds with natural sounds and allows the listener to enter mental landscapes, or what Dalberg calls “mind structures.” These emerge during the subject’s perception of their surroundings. This nonlinear flow of thoughts are a sequence of memories and fantasies applied onto her environment. They dictate a flow of rhythms that record the effect of the outside world rather than the land itself, and proposes a vast interior dimension of landscape.
Through this work, Dalberg draws on references to Henri Bergson and his philosophy of duration. Bergson argued that duration could not be measured mathematically - for a human being time can slow down or accelerate while mathematically it can only be recorded as a constant. He argued for the existence of free will but against any definition of the process which allows for it. In terms of landscape and its effect on the mind, it can only be measured in rhythms of intensity and magnitude that oscillate within the grander scheme of our environment and its own tendencies and pulls from cosmic gravitation. In the landscape intensity flows through gesture, in natural rhythms that slow down and accelerate with the sound of crashing waves or the slow setting of the sun.
In a three-screen installation a character sits by the sea’s craggy shores, accompanying the text through gazes and movements. A tempo mediated by the sea is recorded into language, and transferred into the medium of image representation and technology. Through an immersive presentation, the work’s self-referential tempos translate into a dimension of time inside the enclave of human production, through language, image, and the temporal format of film.
Text by
Àngels Miralda.
Photos: Documents of the video art installation at the Reykjavík Art Museum.
Video 1: Document of the video art installation at the Reykjavík Art Museum.
Video 2. Recording of my voice reading the text with english translations.
Photo: An example of how I analyze my recordings. Walk number one, first 17 sentences out of 192.
Galapagos is a working title for an Artist book, an ongoing research project from 2017. María Dalberg collaborates with the publisher Uns. The book will include poetry and photographs.
A tiny little bird, Red-necked phalarope (Phalaropus lobatus) is the central focus. The bird migrates from Iceland to the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. In 2019, a scientific research was published, mapping down the birds travels from Iceland to the Pacific Ocean. The structure of the book is based on these GPS locations, showing the birds travels.
For María's writings, she studies the red-necked phalarope behaviour and how they communicate by filming them for hours. She focuses on the bird's unique rhythmical movements and translates them into a textual rhythmical structure.
In winter the red-necked phalarope dwells far out of the sea in the Eastern-Pacific Ocean, forming massive flotilla, hundreds to thousands of individuals. In February 2017, María traveled from Iceland to the Galapagos Islands located at the tropical eastern Pacific Ocean. She asked her self if some of these red-necked had been to the Galapagos Islands, possibly lost from their group?
At the Charles Darwin Research Station Library, she found a few resources pinpointing few locations were scientist saw the red-necked phalarope. A flock of birds was at La Lobería lagoon, San Christobal Island 22nd of November, 1997. A single bird found at Tortuga Bay beach, Santa Cruz Island, 18th of September 1962 and another one at the same beach, the 14th of March 1975. These two little birds are now kept at the MECCD collection in Madrid as specimens. A single bird found in the lagoon by the flamingos in Puerto Villamil, Isabela Island in 2000.
María Dalberg photographed these three locations using her medium format Mamiya film camera. She was interested in exploring these locations through the film, creating unique and textures. She used both black and white and color film.
Her next step is to photograph these specimens, found in 1962 and 1975 at Tortuga bay.
She is interested in looking at the red necked phalarope migration in a context of the Vietnam war. She will focus on this peaceful bird migration in contrast to violent acts of war.
Some photographs are documents of the Vietnam war.
An ongoing research project where I test different methods for my writing and filming, trying to understand the surreal in our daily lives. How memories, fiction, and fantasies appear every day, and how they interact with our vision, sense of smell and hearing.
I created a new method called Walks. I walk outside and I read into a dictaphone, and I speak out loud both my thoughts and also what I see, hear or smell. I recorded five 20 min long walks in Reykjavík, mainly recorded by the ocean. After several walks, I listened to the recordings and I wrote down the information. I divided each walk into 192 sentences. I colored sentences that describe the environment with blue color and thoughts, memories and fantasies with an orange color.
For a comparison, I travelled to Mindo, a rainforest in Ecuador, which provided a stimulating environment to explore my method in a new way.
Photos: These photos were photographed while walking by the sea in Reykjavík and also in Mindo rain forest. I used special scanning techniques.
Text: An an example of how I analyze my recordings. Walk 1, the first nineteen sentences.
This research played an essential role for Buzz, my solo show at the Reykjavík Art Museum in 2018.
Black. A sound poem.
Black was an improvisational sound poem, performed by María Dalberg at a conference hosted by the Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic in 2015.
The performance was an experiment on the relationships between spoken words and bodily rhythmic movements. María closed her eyes while performing, and she moved her hand from one body part to another, mapping down different rhythmical movements. She placed her hand on her chest, her neck, her hips, and her eyes. María kept her eyes closed, and she spoke out different words, words that described her visual imagery at that moment.
The title Black refers to the black colour she saw while performing.
Black. A film.
The film black is an experiment were Maria performs different movements, reading different words coming from her visual imagery.
María presented her film Black at the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art. Curator Nadim Samman.
Video art installation from 2009.
I asked myself, how can I create a video that flows like a running water?
The process.
I recorded myself flying in circles. Then I projected the film on a wall and filmed the projection. I placed an empty glass between the camera and the projection and filled the glass with colored water. I repeated this process 32 times.
I built a rounded house, fitting one person. The spectator was surrounded by seven screen. A running water connected the frames.
Video 1: A documentation of the installation.
Video 2: Different experiments from 2008.