Experimental Design
Linnea Langfjord Kristensen
Linnea Langfjord Kristensen (1991) is an artist, theatre-maker, researcher and writer from Denmark. Before coming to the RCA she studied Fine Arts at The Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work has been shown at exhibitions and museums such as Fringe Arts Bath (UK), Stedelijk Musem Amsterdam (NL) and De Vishal (NL). Upcoming solo shows include Art Room 1000Fryd in Denmark.
My projects take the form of kaleidoscopic performances/plays, encounters, books, and workshops. In different ways they investigate the production and distribution of meaning, realities, and languages, with special attention to the ways in which narratives around “the meaningful” are embodied in everyday life. I work with a desire to peel away layers of the world I am inhabiting – dismantling dominating realities and languages to create new ones, however small, fantastical, poetic, sad, weird, or challenging. My practice is guided by continuously developing methods for radical relations which allows for an alternative knowledge and value production and consumption through dependency and intimacy.
Trailer — Trailer for the play
Performance still
Script excerpt
Full performance
Character descriptions — Apart from Dominating Power Structures, all characters adopt the name of their actor.
This is a play about real/reality/representation with a set of characters trying to understand what it means to be real when reality itself is a representation. The narrative of the play is concerned with the prevailing understanding of what it means to be a successful human being in our culture and the negative consequences the ways we measure this success has on people’s mental health. The duration is 75 minutes and it takes place on the platform Zoom. The play aims to translate complex philosophical ideas and contemporary social critiques into an engaging and compelling narrative for an audience who would not normally be exposed to those critiques. By ways of actions and character traits the theory, philosophy and critiques are embodied and carried out by the characters. With this work I hope to make an audience reconsider what we all do on a day to day basis to “reach where we want to be” and whether our “wants” are actually produced by ourselves or a dominating outside which benefits from our quest to getting there. Are our wants in life “real” or are they representations of the dominating structures of the society in which we live? To further explore this, the play involves the actors switching between scripted material, improvisation and their own personal stories. Though, is an anticipated improvisation any more real than the scripted? Is a rehearsed, personal story not a representation of the past? What is personal (in the sense of coming from within a person) and what are just internalised emotions from an elsewhere?
As the play has moved online due to Covid-19 I have developed and engaged in entirely new processes to push the boundaries of digital theatre, rehearsals and acting.
Synopsis:
MC cannot remember anything or keep a straight thought for longer periods of time. Fighting to make him remember again is his old friend who has been visiting him every week for the last two years. A recurring event he never recalls. The mother X yearns to become independent, but what exactly happened to her daughter? And what is MC’s relation to this? B2 has always been told he was destined to become a famous writer, so does it matter that the stories he writes harm the people around him? Always watching and dictating is the Child, forcing everyone to keep busy, reach their full potential and strive to be real people. If they do not listen she will penalise them with fines or death. This story is one of loss, measures of success, friendship and the struggle to survive for those who crack under the pressure to be real.
As the play has moved online due to Covid-19 I have developed and engaged in entirely new processes to push the boundaries of digital theatre, rehearsals and acting.
Synopsis:
MC cannot remember anything or keep a straight thought for longer periods of time. Fighting to make him remember again is his old friend who has been visiting him every week for the last two years. A recurring event he never recalls. The mother X yearns to become independent, but what exactly happened to her daughter? And what is MC’s relation to this? B2 has always been told he was destined to become a famous writer, so does it matter that the stories he writes harm the people around him? Always watching and dictating is the Child, forcing everyone to keep busy, reach their full potential and strive to be real people. If they do not listen she will penalise them with fines or death. This story is one of loss, measures of success, friendship and the struggle to survive for those who crack under the pressure to be real.
Medium:
Performance, video, trailerSize:
1 hour and 10 minutesIn Collaboration with:
Raphael Von Blumenthal, Henriette Laursen, Leila Vega Fass, Leo Graham and Meg Lake
Narrative of success and endless progress — Diagram showing a dominating narrative of how to become a successful human being/real person. Following Theodore Adorno, we live in a society whose culture pursues progress at whatever cost. This means, that which is “other,” whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed. The all-consuming engine driving this process is an ever-expanding capitalist economy. This manifests itself in the actions, goals and wishes of people in their everyday lives trying to reach their full potential and endlessly progress. Because that is a value in our culture. Furthermore, there is a promise that this is how you become successful.
Play World — Diagram showing how the world of the play works.
This research came to be through experiences I have had with language and the actions of people around me in the quest for becoming a real, successful and individual human being. Over the years I have noticed a particular vocabulary centred around independence, strength, being self-ruling, endlessly progress, reaching your full potential, productivity and being busy connected to this value. I am interested in where this vocabulary comes from and how it becomes behaviour.
Every week I used have more or less the same conversation with a housemate which revolved around her hunt for independence. Whenever she needed another person, she declared a strong wish for being able to do everything independently. She believed she was failing because she was not yet independent. Because when you are independent in life, you have made it right? When you can feed yourself, pay rent, get through emotional problems alone and in general, do life purely by your own support, you are successfully a successful human being. This is a contradictory conversation, as she needed me to share her longing for independence with.
Why is individual independence something to aim for when it is so difficult to reach? Why is success in this particular way something positive, when it brings so much negative impact on people’s mental health with it because no one is ever good enough? Why is society’s need for endless progress and people reaching that unmeasurable, elusive full potential good, when some of the consequences are a suffering planet emptied of resources and an all-over decline in mental well-being?
The diagrams and brief descriptions are ways to visualise why many of us might feel, that the words in the above vocabulary, are fitting descriptions of how to become a successful, independent and real human being according to the society in which we live and how they (might) affect us negatively.
Every week I used have more or less the same conversation with a housemate which revolved around her hunt for independence. Whenever she needed another person, she declared a strong wish for being able to do everything independently. She believed she was failing because she was not yet independent. Because when you are independent in life, you have made it right? When you can feed yourself, pay rent, get through emotional problems alone and in general, do life purely by your own support, you are successfully a successful human being. This is a contradictory conversation, as she needed me to share her longing for independence with.
Why is individual independence something to aim for when it is so difficult to reach? Why is success in this particular way something positive, when it brings so much negative impact on people’s mental health with it because no one is ever good enough? Why is society’s need for endless progress and people reaching that unmeasurable, elusive full potential good, when some of the consequences are a suffering planet emptied of resources and an all-over decline in mental well-being?
The diagrams and brief descriptions are ways to visualise why many of us might feel, that the words in the above vocabulary, are fitting descriptions of how to become a successful, independent and real human being according to the society in which we live and how they (might) affect us negatively.
Medium:
Digital diagramsSize:
N/A
The Fold — The production of subjectivity is an act of folding the dominating outside inside (development of Gilles Deleuze’s notion of The Fold).
Power — By ways of folding the dominating outside inside, subjects internalise the Dominating Power Structures of society. These structures are decentralised and often invisible as they exercise their power through institutions, knowledge and norms which manifests itself in the actions, goals and wishes of people in their everyday life.
Dominating Power Structures — Reality is usually thought to be real. However, if reality is merely a representation of Dominating Power Structures which subjects internalise and act out in everyday life, and reality is “real”, that makes both reality and “real” representations.
The Fake & Acted Theatre — To many, theatre is ”fake and acted” and in opposition to “real” life. From this lens then, theatre may allow for The Actual Real to enter exactly because it is not “real” or reality.
These 4 diagrams are visualisations of the theories and philosophical ideas which are the foundation for the play.
Medium:
Digital drawingsSize:
(please click images to see in full)
Character diagram
Diagram of the characters
Kitchen — X's and B2's kitchen
Room — X's room
Room — The main character's room
Room — B2's room
Each of the actors’ backgrounds have been either composed from the objects in the actors’ room or painted and used with a green screen. In the process of making these I have had to figure out how to make some of the characters be in the same room even when in separate isolation at home. This establishes new parallels between real/representation, and physical/virtual within the set of the play, experimenting with a visually provoking use of mixed media and digital resources. At the same time, it raises new relationships between improvisation and how the intimate spaces of the actors come into the scene and the audience.
Medium:
watercolour, digital painting, photography, collage
Wings
As part of the set-design, the diagrams have been translated into stage wings.
Medium:
Silk, silk paintSize:
65 cm. x 200 cm.27 July 2020
18:00 (GMT + 0)
Zoom