The island isn’t far from the coast and as we approach, I hear hammering and see people working. The landscape is not as dramatic as I thought — there are no ancient rock formations — but it looks vaguely famil- iar from Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice which was filmed on Gotland and probably from some Bergman movies I’ve seen. There are very few trees on the island and it feels like a giant field, the size of about four soccer fields. I walk in the direction of the builders.

They are working on a structure that looks something like a piece of playground equipment, or pieces of playground equipment attached to each other to create a larger construction. There is a swing set and a seesaw. One young man sits lounging on a swing. I count six others hammering or sawing on various other constructions that look like they will be attached to the main structure. For the most part they are young people: I’d guess between 22 and 35. They notice my presence and a few people nod their heads in acknowledgement, but no one comes over. I don’t know whether or not I can ask for Almborg. As a non-builder I suppose there is nothing that says I can’t speak, but if the participants haven’t heard spoken language for a long time, I don’t want to impose. I err on the side of caution and remain quiet, looking around to see if I can find Almborg. One of the builders points down towards the beach and I see that a few people are swimming about 200 metres away. I walk over to them, and a man with a camera spots me and walks over. He greets me with a handshake and an awkward smile and I assume this is Almborg. He makes a gesture that I interpret to mean something like, ‘Welcome, make yourself at home.’ He points at my bag and then points in the direction of what looks like a campsite. I nod, smile, do a little bow to say ‘Thanks’, and walk over to the campsite to leave my bag.

At the campsite there are two large tents, and I drop my bag down outside one of them. I look around and see the remnants of the night before: a pit filled with campfire ash, some empty beer cans, plastic cups that look like they contained wine, cigarette butts. I also see what resembles homemade musical instruments. There is something that looks kind of like a guitar and a pair of makeshift drums. I wonder if singing is allowed as I take a blanket out of my bag and walk back to the construction site. I sit on the blanket in the grass and observe the builders. The first thing I think of is Cistercian and Carthusian monks, who not only spend their lives in silence, but also emphasize manual labour and construction in their activities. None of these monks actually take a vow of silence, and discussion and conversation is permitted under certain circumstances, such as functional communication for teaching or work; what is disallowed is leisurely chatting. Such behaviour, such strict observance of a rule, is usually associated with asceticism. The austerity is based on a notion that there is a level of spiritual or religious happiness far superior to any happiness one can find through indulgence. I wonder if the builders are feeling something like this, or if they constantly feel as though they are refraining from something vital by not being able to use language. I wonder if they feel as though their silence is bringing them to a higher spiritual plane, whatever that might mean.

I am curious how it works with the food: Is all of the food brought by the fisherman? How is it coordinated? Just as I start thinking about food, it appears to be lunchtime. No one makes an official sign or signal, but everyone seems to notice when two persons starts cooking. They heat up the cooking pan over the fire and make falafel balls from a packaged powder.

Film: Extract from 30 min film
Text: Extract from book

Installation view Konsthall C 2012 here
More Installation views: here and here

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Notes from a visitor
15th of July 2010.

As I get out of the boat onto the beach I hear hammering. I walk in the direction of the noise and come to an open field beside the sea. The builders are working on a structure that looks something like a piece of playground equipment, or pieces of playground equipment attached to each other to create a larger construction. There is a swing set and a seesaw. One young man sits lounging on a swing. I count six others hammering or sawing on various other constructions that look like they will be attached to the main structure. They notice my presence and a few people nod their heads in acknowledgement but no one comes over. I don’t know whether or not I can ask for ‘Emanuel’. As a non-builder I suppose there is nothing that means I can’t speak but if the participants haven’t heard spoken language in days I don’t want to impose. I err on the side of caution and remain quiet, walking around to see if I can find Emanuel. One of the builders points down towards the beach and I see that a few people are swimming about two hundred meters away. I walk over to them and a man with a camera spots me and walks over. He greets me with a handshake and an awkward smile and I assume this is Emanuel. He makes a gesture that I interpret to mean something like, ‘Welcome, make yourself at home.’ He points at my bag and then points in the direction of what looks like a campsite. I nod, smile, do a little bow to say ‘Thanks’, and walk over to the campsite to leave my bag.

About 35 years earlier, in the late 1970s a group of people living in the borough of Hackney began building a structure on a derelict lot in their neighbourhood. They continued building until January 2009. The story of the project’s origins is shrouded in mystery. What is known is that because the residents couldn’t decide on what they wanted to build, they made three rules. The first was that not only would they build without any plan or blueprint, they would not discuss the direction of the project at all. Second, when they were on the building site, no one was allowed to speak. Third, the building would never be completed in that anyone at any point could decide to take it in a new direction. So the structure was built for thirty years until the autumn of 2008 when the council sold the land to a developer who tore it down in January 2009. The structure was the subject and inspiration for the initial part of my project. I began by photographing the structure in the months prior to its destruction and started compiling an archive of sorts of its history. The first outcome of this project was a book titled The Rest Is Silence published in 2009. The book features archival images together with my own photographs of the structure taken weeks before its demolition and a critical essay written by theorist Jeff Kinkle. The book did not provide an historical account of what happened or why it happened, because such an attempt would conflict with the very nature of the project: Its anonymity and concealment are essential. Instead, I wanted to present a visual index of its existence, the set of conditions that frames the project and attempts to imagine the ideas and possibilities that surround it.

In addition to the book I made a sound and slideshow installation at formcontent, a project space close to where the structure was located, and invited Kinkle to talk and elaborate on the ideas surrounding the project. The sound and slideshow installation consisted of an audio recording of a conversation between me and two of the original builders. Their voices were erased – all that was heard was one side of a conversation: me asking a series of questions, punctuated by long intervals of silence. The images were a mix of archival photos provided by a local community centre and close ups I took of the structure weeks before its demolition. None of the photos showed the structure in its totality. After a long conversation with Kinkle, he concluded: The commune that brought the structure into existence on this plot of land in Hackney, and the existence of the silent conspiracy maintained and defended with and in the constant progression of material shapes and forms, are certainly a proof of something. But to find out what, like the original builders, we perhaps need to stop talking and start building.

Inspired by, and as a continuation of the ideas surrounding my last project, I decided to stage a similar experiment under very different conditions on a small island outside Gotland, Sweden in the summer of 2010. I wanted to explore the relationship between community and communication and look at a broad concept of language and its relation to creativity and collectivity. I was aware that the facts that the project would produce could only be seen in relation to the specifics of the project and its construct and context, but in the works produced as a result of the project I wanted to try to draw connections to more general questions around the nature of communication. As such the project can be seen as a case study, a social experiment and an artwork. My intention was for all of these perspectives to exist alongside each other in the process. The basic questions of the project were the following: If language is central to the human community what happens if we suspend it? How do we relate to each other and how does it affect our social relations and collaboration? Do we find new ways of communicating or do we accept the silence? The project was going to result in visual and performative attempts to find answers to these questions.

During ten days a group of eleven people, including myself, lived on a small island without speaking. The group consisted of six female and five male participants, one Italian, one French, one Austrian and the rest were Swedish. None of us knew each other very well in advance and many had never met before at all. Three participants constituted a small film team. The rest engaged in the task of building a wooden structure together without plan or blueprint and with a restricted amount of basic materials and tools. Anyone could build and work together in whatever way they wanted as long as they did so without using language. Written or spoken words where not used at all during the time we spent on the island. In addition to the collaboration on the structure we, including the film team, had to organize and divide our everyday practicalities, making food, washing dishes, emptying the toilet and taking care of the fire. The film team lived with and had to work together under the same conditions as the other participants, without using language. They had no more then 30 minutes of film a day at their disposal and their mission was to document everyday situations and social interactions, with a recurring focus on the collaborative efforts constructing the structure. The film was meant to depict how the participants’ social relations change during their time in silence and how we work together and what we create when communication is barred. At the same time, because of the conditions that the film team had to work under the film was meant to result in something in between a documentation and a product of the process (its limitations) and as such its very construction would mirror the work on structure. When the film team did not shoot, they were free to join the others and work on the structure or do whatever they wanted.

As I said before, when I started this project my main concerns were focused on the relationship between community and communication, and a collective suspension of language. But after my experiences from the island my thoughts have shifted to focus more on the relationship between identity and community. I found that collaborating without speaking is not so difficult; you quickly find new ways of communicating to solve easy and practical tasks. But it’s a very limited form of communication and its impossible to express more complicated ideas. What surprised me the most was how easy it was to live and feel close to people that you did not know very well and did not have the language to get to know in the traditional sense of telling “one’s story” background or personal beliefs. After a few days living and working together we developed different relationships to each other, even friendships, some more and some less. I would even say that a sense of belonging and affection developed despite knowing barely anything of each other’s background or “identity”. Who you where in the group was defined by what you did and how you preformed rather then what you claimed to be, your beliefs or an ideology. This also affected social relations and hierarchies, everyone was quite eager to collaborate and contribute within the group, perhaps because of the strong link between who you were and what you did. Asking for something with a gesture often came out as a demand, which sometimes perhaps was a more honest way of putting it, but it also made you feel obliged to give something back to the group in return. It’s my experience that our living conditions almost had a kind de-subjectifying effect in the way that our temporary community was formed by giving and receiving and collaborating rather than a shared personal belief, subjective properties or identity.

From the beginning doing this project had a kind of utopian dimension. First in the double movement of separation and creation, what French philosopher Gilles Deleuze characterized as one of main features of the desert island. Leaving civilization could be seen as analogous to leaving language. Creating the structure together could be seen as analogous to creating new ways of communicating and being together. At the same time this double separation-creation involved a re-creation, the tools and wood are brought to the island from the mainland, our communication at many times was an attempt to express what we normally would say in our native languages. Still I would argue that the disruption in communication and living conditions strongly affected our way of being together and opened up possibilities to play and experiment with social relations, communication and ways of being that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. In this way the project resembles counter-cultural experiments from the 60s and 70s of creating “alternative societies”, Italian autonomists and concepts such as “Temporary Autonomous Zones” as theorized by Hakim Bey. In these concepts creating alternatives and finding points of exit is a political strategy of resistance. Franco “Bifo” Berardi has claimed that autonomy, as a part of a political strategy “is not trying to change the world but to begin a withdrawal”. However, “withdrawal is not simply withdrawal, but a way to find… new words…to find a way to start a new way of perceiving the world.”

Although I share a belief in the importance of creating alternative visions and experiences as a source for inspiration and experimentation, I am quite modest about how useful they are in a practical political sense. For me the possibilities lay more in the inspiration, sense of direction or fantasy and desire that the attempt, if successful, might create than practical conclusions or a blue print that could be drawn. In other words, I would like to think of my project as a myth or fragments of an attempt to create new ways of experiencing what living together might mean and the way it might influence and inspire new and other experiments and actions that play with and deconstruct languages of the present. In 1967, the time out of witch the ideas around the original project in Hackney was born, Situationist Raoul Vaneigem identified modern dominant language with a form authoritarian control and alienation and makes a radical call for a new one. He writes:
“The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts, words and actions towards itself. We will have to speak until we can do without words.”

Composed from out-takes and off-camera footage from a leading Swedish news programme, Emanuel Almborg’s “Newsreel’ presents a negative mirror of this super-abundant time and delivery, of this always full, necessarily interesting, live time and delivery. Bracketed by a theme tune based on the pulse of a ticking clock and the portentous countdown that it inevitably heralds – a signal dictating that decisions need to be made, that we are out of time even before the programme begins, that things are coming to a crunch – Almborg presents the obverse face of the hurried expression of the day’s digest (literally so since it is not action but remote faces that are front and centre in this remainder footage).

What is seen there is anticipation, boredom, thousand-yard-stares, thought, patience, self-preparation, nervousness, pre-occupation (perhaps with the director’s voice channeled through the newsreaders’ ear-pieces), relief – like videogame characters churning through the minor range of quasi-active movements they are programmed to repeat while waiting for their next instruction, for the new bolt of information. And it is not only the silence and readiness of the news anchors that is brought into view but also the listless camera shots, pointing down, up, sideways, wild pans from presentation point to point, their steady holding onto nothing much at all happening, or on some semi-random details of the set. All of which are the underside, what remains – must remain – unexposed if the news is to be delivered with full authority. The extranaeous footage exposes not only the anchors’ banality when removed of the command of their message, but also that the real-time live is in fact saturated and cloaked in a preparatory, self-conscious time of silence and withdrawal.

Presented, the invisible preparation and dead time that structures the ‘live’ urgency of news exposes that the urgency of the live, the indefatigable demand of news on our attention, is filled with inattention and a dead time, a pensive-idle moment poised on the edge of its delivery to the now.

When did you first come across the structure?

I’ve lived in Dalston and Stoke Newington for the past few years and I used to pass the structure on my bicycle every once in a while. I had stopped and taken photographs one night but I didn’t know what it really was though until I read about it in an unusual article in the Hackney Gazette riding on the 149 bus one day.
I’ve lived in East London for several years and have never heard anyone even mention this.

Why do you think it has remained outside of the London art world for so long?

Not many people know about it. It is unusual how little attention this project has received, particularly when someone like Banksy was receiving so much attention. You’d at least have expected it to have been covered by Iain Sinclair on have entered the annals of Hackney mythology together with the Mole Man or whatever. Why this is I couldn’t really say. I suppose there are people in France who have never heard of Postman Cheval’s Palais Idéal, and urban planners and sociologists in the States who have never seen The Wire. At the same time I don’t want to give the impression that no one knew about the structure. Many people in the neighborhood used it as a playground or even enjoyed it as an artwork, perhaps without knowing the full story behind it.

Is the ongoing process of gentrification that’s taking place in Hackney at the moment relevant to the project?

The latest wave of gentrification is largely responsible for the structure being torn down. There are of course models from the past of residents taking over a piece of derelict land and turning into a proper park, People’s Park in Berkley, California being perhaps the most well known example, but it often takes a degree of political mobilization and organization that was probably beyond the residents at the time. That being said, a project like this could also be incorporated into the gentrification process – “luxury flats with a direct view of outsider art” – but it would at the very least prevent the space from becoming condos or a Tesco or whatever.

Is the location of the structure important to you at all or would it be equally interesting anywhere?

The project would inevitably be different if it was realized on an island in Stockholm’s archipelago instead of a densely populated and incredibly diverse, urban area like Hackney, but I don’t know if I would consider it less interesting. On a very basic level, what I find inspiring about the project is that a group of people, largely strangers, came together to continually build this structure without a blueprint or objective goal. The space it creates is inevitable heterotopic, to borrow a concept from Foucault. It is a counter-site, a place freed from the rationality of the market and any kind of instrumentality, a pure means without a predetermined or predictable end.

What are your main concerns in this project?

I think part of my initial fascination with the structure was the fact that I knew so little about it. Like I said, it’s the kind of thing you would expect to have been photographed and written about endlessly, and that it remained obscure for so long is extraordinary. My intention was never to do an exposé on the construction or to decipher the participants’ motivations. I’m not just documenting the structure: its history, creation, and demolition. I wanted to capture the mystery that always cloaked the structure for me: its stillness and its silence. I have never seen anyone actually working at the site so at times the structure has felt like an ancient ruin left by a distant civilization.

Why do you think they made the rule about silence? Was it just to prevent squabbling or was their rationale more profound?

When I mention the project to people it is usually the silence that people are most curious about: usually the extent to which this rule was enforced and what the exceptions might be. Could they use sign language or make gestures to each other? What if someone hammered their finger, could they scream? Didn’t they inevitably discuss it with fellow builders if they ran into each other on the bus or at the pub? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions. The idea of working in silence seems to connote a kind of asceticism (vows of silence, etc.), but I’m not sure how much it was simply a practical question in the project’s early days.

Do you see the project as a social experiment or a sculpture or both?

It is certainly a social experiment in that it is, as far as I know, a completely novel method of constructing something collectively. Occasionally I see it as sculpture and sometimes more as architecture (in that it could be used as a jungle gym, or as a shelter), if that is a meaningful distinction. Of course since the architects/sculptures/carpenters decided not to speak about it (at least as far as I know), their intentions, or what they’ve accomplished and how they feel about it, it is difficult to say what exactly the results of this experiment have been.

Why do you think it was built?

I wouldn’t want to speculate. A large number of people took part in its construction over decades and I’m sure their motivations varied considerably. The participants’ agreement not to speak about the project prevented any kind of consensus from emerging and I don’t feel as though it’s my place to impose a justification or a rationale for the project. This is perhaps something for the viewer to ponder.

More photos can be found here and here

Theorist Jeff Kinkle gives a talk about the project at Formcontent, London 26th of Sep 2009 here

An interview with me about the project in Dossier journal 2009 can be found here

A publication i made about the project is available here

Installation view Konsthall C 2012 here

Installation view Formcontent

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The video opens with a candid shot of the protagonist looking straight at the camera and stating: “My mother always told me that imposters are so common that the one who speaks the truth often gets taken for the liar”. Coupled with two different views of Blackpool, this opening sequence lays the foundations for the work’s recurring themes: the notion of doubling – the one and the other – formalized through the use of mirrors and repetition, the dichotomy of the authentic versus the copy, as well as the idea of quotation, alluded to through the use of his mother’s words. Serving as a backdrop for the unfolding drama, the desolated shots of Blackpool further underscore these themes. Once a thriving beach-resort for the working class on the British north coast, Blackpool is a city in imminent decline, scrambling to hold onto its waning tourism industry by launching itself into the dazzling artificiality of the casino business.

The unnamed character is credibly portrayed as an honest ordinary man through documentary techniques, interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. His uncanny resemblance inspires a misplaced disbelief, for this doubling is a decoy for a greater illusion: the documentary mode’s redeeming power to elevate an ordinary man to the heroic status of the leading man. As the protagonist stoically poses standing in front of a casino halfway through the video, his voice is heard rehearsing lines from the script of Taxi Driver: “here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up to the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is someone who stood up.” Yet, as is well know, the closing sequence of this movie positions Robert De Niro’s ordinary but psychopathic character as a sham, mistakenly declared a hero by the media.

Accordingly, the title “The Other Man” does not only refer to the lone protagonist’s visual counterpart Robert De Niro. It designates the video’s ordinary actor not only by virtue of his resemblance to the better-known public persona, but on account of his commonness as a working class man. Nameless, he could easily be substituted by another equally ordinary man, were it not for his fated and anti-heroic likeness.

Michel de Certeau writes: “Called Everyman (a name that betrays the absence of a name), this anti-hero is thus also Nobody (…) He is always the other, without his own responsibilities (“It’s not my fault, it’s the other: destiny”) (…) Rather than being merely represented in it, the ordinary man acts out the text itself, in and by the text, and in addition he makes plausible the universal character of the particular place in which the mad discourse of a knowing wisdom is pronounced.” Engaged in an existential quest for a missing part, the leading character of this video utters the script of his own otherness as an everyman: “What if he were to kill me, step into my clothes to replace me. (…) He would be me. Would anyone notice? Would I notice?” The unnamed man is expendable; he can be substituted not only by his double, but more generally, by any one else. This everyman is as much an actor as Robert De Niro, rehearsing for the camera the script of his unique personal existence as well as the greater text of his fate as the necessary other.

De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. Steven Rendall) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 p. 2.

Installation view

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