On the beaches of Fårö one may find skeleton parts, fossils, and bits of plastic: traces of life that charge one another. The pre-historic fossils within a modern place also recalls primeval times through oil molecules, a fossil fuel.
Today we delegate more and more human functions to technology, and a great deal of our everyday communication is made through the internet. Thinking about how technology makes us superfluous is interesting. By giving life to dead things, Signe Johannessen leads us to think about the limits of this evolution. In the project 8 she combines technical components and organic forms into objects that could be future leftovers. The work is inspired by the artist’s upbringing, which centred around a spiritual idea of exalting the natural, but it is likewise also a reaction against that idea.
In parallel to the exhibition 8 We are a Parenthesis on the Earth at Botkyrka Konsthall, Signe Johannessen was invited to participate in YAPP in Botkyrka in collaboration with the Royal College of Art. The artist opened her artistic process and invited the participants of YAPP on an exploration voyage back to where the project 8 We are a Parenthesis on the Earth began on Fårö, where sky and sea meet. Johannessen conducted several workshops about human vulnerability on Earth. One of them entailed that participants and the artist re-enacted the downfall of the Earth. The results of the series of workshops were taken back to the konsthall where the exhibition was activated by the YAPP project.
Signe Johannessen collaborated with the photographer John Warden for the project. Objects she had created were placed in abandoned and overgrown urban landscapes, such as closed roads and forgotten parking lots, and were then photographed.
