The Soundtrack of the Stock Market: Svein Flygari Johansen
Bankers on the telephone, bankers shouting, hurried footsteps, and the rustling of clothing: these are the background sounds you would normally expect to hear at the world’s stock markets. For those not at the scene of the action, the rising and falling of stock prices occurs in silence—followed on a ticker.
The Norwegian artist Svein Flygari Johansen, on the other hand, discovered a very individual soundtrack: the Altaelva River.
The Altaelva flows through northern Norway. Johansen is from the nearby city of Alta. Here, the sun does not set at the height of summer for two months, and in the depths of winter does not rise. Alta lies north of the Artic Circle, and since 1982 it is the site of a dam and a hydro-electric plant.
‘What I present here—The Call of the Wild—is an old work from 2001. It is a campfire site from my home city of Alta and from my home river, because that is where I grew up, near the river. In the ‘80s there was a conflict about the river, because of a power plant. People from Germany and around the world came up north to us to fight against the power plant. But it was built anyway. When I was young, I would sit next to this campfire and listen to the older folks tell their stories. That stopped, though, after they built the power plant.
While working on this piece, I collected the remains of the original campfire site—the stones and sticks—and chromed them. So they look like a mirror, like a shiny mirror. I then recorded the sounds of the river, above and below the surface, and linked them with the stock market. Right now the installation is connected to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. When the prices rise, you hear the sounds recorded above the water’s surface, and when they fall you hear the underwater sounds, which are lower in frequency. The software program checks the prices on the markets every five seconds, so you can hear the market fluctuating.'
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‘This is a very political work for me, because it is concerned with how money controls nature. Everything is owned, everything is appropriated for our use. Nothing is left the way it is, just for the sake of its existence in nature. At some point, we will have control of everything natural—or most of it. We put a human imprint on everything.’
Johansen’s chromed camp fire site is located on the floor at the exhibition. Visitors almost run the risk of overlooking it and tripping over it. We see ourselves reflected faintly in the shiny chrome. The sounds of the river radiate from above, seeming almost meditative. Then it occurs to us that we are listening to the movements of the stock market—in real time.
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What we didn’t ask:
Whether the people in Alta still sit around the camp fire telling stories.
What else was said:
That art is actually not that interesting: ‘I’m interested in the language that art offers me. That is why I don’t look at much art, but try instead to find out how I can use art as a language. I try to find ways to tell stories. That is my main concern. I only need art to tell stories. Every story that is told has a political aspect. I don’t know whether art changes anything. But art give people a language with which they can talk about politics.’
Where is the work in the exhibition:
In Room 8, ‘A Hundred Years’, on the floor.
When does he feel the most free:
‘In nature, far away from the next road. High up in the mountains.'
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somebodyelse
ha-ha, to me it seems also like mind/ideas/concepts over mater :))...:(...and the issue is very contemporary indeed...thanks 4 nice work! on the other hand... if i'm going to quote someone i'd appeal to what the "agents" from the matrix movie say: humans are the only creatures here who developed a unbalance with nature... all the best!