Description:
At the Stockholm Natural History Museum’s herbarium I came to work with a particular plant that was previously suspected to be endemic* to the Arctic Svalbard region. This species of grass, Dupontia Fischeri, was collected by the Swedish biologist and Arctic explorer Alfred Gabriel Nathorst in 1882.
My piece plays with ideas about belonging and identity in relation to the romanticism of the old-school explorer. The slide show contains 80 extreme close-ups of this grass which are switched by the projector every 10 seconds. The image is projected onto a two-way mirror that hangs from the ceiling. The mirror divides the projected rays and two images from the same slide are projected onto two different screens. One image is a flipped image that goes straight through the two-way mirror. The other one is bounced off the same mirror onto the second screen and sways as a result of the way the mirror has been loosely hung. A model of Carl Andrée’s, the famous Swedish Polar explorer, hot air balloon, The Eagle, casts its shadow on one of the screens.

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