ONCE YOU GO BLACK 2009
This video-triptych consists of the re-editing of three works from 2008/2009.
The action in the video Hyperborean-room ballads (2008) takes place in the central video-panel. During a telepathy séance, Bugge establishes contact with her father and his lead-dog. A Congolese animal interpreter conducts the séance. The answers the interpreter provides tell us as much about herself as about the artist. The title of the work alludes to the myth of the Hyperborean people, who, according to Greek mythology, were a spiritual tribe who lived in perpetual sunshine at the North Pole. The further one retreated from the North Pole, the darker it became. As darkness descended, degeneration set in culminating in its material centre at the South Pole. In modern times, such ideas have been exploited in racist cultural theories and rhetoric.
The side-panels consists of the two works We had no road (2008) and Exterminate all brutes (2009). The first is partly inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s poem Adriane’s Complaint. The poem refers to an event when Nietzsche was fifteen. While out wandering in the forest he met a hunter and fainted shortly thereafter. This intense meeting would often return in his dreams, and in his later writings he refers to this hunter as his god.
Exterminate all brutes (2009) is the third film to be edited into this installation, which is partly based on a visit to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Brussels. The museum has the largest collection of Central African culture. The cellar is a temporal document, which can also be seen as a repository for hunting trophies and death. An animation on h
ow to perform taxidermy and open and clean septic wounds accompanies the images.