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.