FALLING UPWARDS
HD video triptych, looped,
without sound: 05:42, 04:07, 06:15.
Text, interactive website, artist’s book.
2021
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FALLING UPWARDS uses images and text in an expanded montage lingering in-between gravity, the collision and the bomb. In a cosmic drama speaking through association and speculation, it is assembling the traces left behind from the trajectories of the objects, events and people following the explosion.
One of the project's point of departure was Sascha Schneider's image Der Anarchist that came about in eighteen hundred and ninety four. Picturing a muscular man holding a bomb, which he heavily rests on his one shoulder, in a contrapposto, waiting until the moment that he will, in an iconoclastic act, throw it at the nearby statues placed in the background of the image. His image The Anarchist seems to exist from a memory of his from thirteen years earlier when the then ten-year old Sascha Schneider walks through the street of Moscow, and suddenly got caught by the sound of an explosion. The bomb that detonated was shortly followed by another one; the bomb that took the life of Russian Tsar Alexander II.
A bomb constructed by the hands of Nikolai Kibalchich, a scientist and member of the revolutionary political organization Narodnaya Volya (the People's will). On the day before Kibalchich execution, he makes a drawing directly onto the prison wall. A drawing which he later describes to his lawyer to be the construction for an aeronautic machine. Drawn from both his knowledge as a scientist and as a political revolutionary, as a constructor of bombs.
Moving from an explosion that reformed the political landscape, into the explosion of an engine that would forever change the field of technology, this image is creating a passage from the deadly explosion to the machine. From the outlines of the first known rocket towards an engine that could escape the gravitational forces of earth and reaching escape velocity.
In the video installation FALLING UPWARDS, three vertical screens are split into two squares, continuously switching in-between images. The tempo uses a contrapuntal movement, letting the time go in and out of sync, where one image take over the narrative, before another one takes its place.
In addition to the video installation there is a text work that elaborates on the possible background stories contained in and in parallel to the images seen in the video installation. This collection of texts begins with Kibalchich's bombs and the attack in 1881. The text has been published as a book and as an interactive webpage.
© Joel Danielsson & Louise Öhman