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About a Whirlwind
As a context-specific work that could be seen as a critical and political observation and commentary and an inspired brush with realism, Skopje Whirlwind manages to become Theo Ågren and Bjorn Hegardt’s most challenging work to date. For the first time in their collaborative practice they venture away from the culturally recognizable and socially comprehensible territories of previous projects. In the work created in Skopje there is a slightly different approach to context, to connecting and communicating, and ultimately opening up new possibilities to documenting living environments of strangers. They earn the trust of their subjects with relative ease, and once the inside pass to the incongruous order of values is secured, their course of locating the meaningful amid the contextual could easily assume.
People could barricade themselves from the curious “other” or choose to open to the invitation to have their environment scanned for traces of the meaningful and the useless. As a pre-scripted documentary in search for its location, Skopje Whirlwind could also be seen as an exercise in dramaturgy evolving beyond the scripted and in the realm of the uncontrolled. Whirlwinds are not natural disasters, they are a phenomenon, and unsettling as they may be, they provoke new order and fresh energy.
In Macedonia history has been rewritten many times anew. We all have our reasons to remember things differently and to hold our own version as official. But history, if compared to bright sun
light, could also be seen as blinding and disabling. We need to cover our eyes and protect them. Or we may choose to stare back, at least out of curiosity, and try to decipher what is behind the light. A whirlwind maybe, or something else to challenge the perfect order we tend to seek in history knowing very well it could never be achieved.
Yane Calovski, artistic director
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Theo Ågren and Bjørn Hegardt
SKOPJE WHIRLWIND
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October 27 – November 24, 2006
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