On the Weight of Stories
Sophia Ioannou Gjerding presupposes history as an ever-shifting constellation of stories. To understand the evolution of humans is to interpret visual stories, while the deep time of Earth reveals itself to us in the sounds of animals, land, natural phenomena, and celestial bodies that far exceed our existence. Her practice presents an excavation-in-progress, where valleys of the uncanny are unearthed from our familial world.
Gjerding’s practice is archaeological in method and speculative in form, with images playing a central role. She begins her process in places where historicity strives to be both wide and deep, including institutional archives and even video games. There, she collects statues, photographs, documents, characters, and anecdotes, adding artifacts of varying source materials to her ‘carrier bag.’ From this repository, Gjerding selects fragmented nodes to input into relational networks, creating new configurations of protagonists and story arcs that push us to (re)encounter images that saturate our everyday lives.
Both historiography and storytelling have never been objective. Prop People (2018) explores the politics of how and to whom agency is imparted within the narrative creation process. The narrator of the two-channel video installation is Princess Zelda who is a key figure in the background story of the video game The Legend of Zelda. However, in the game itself, her role is more akin to that of a non-playable character (NPC). Gjerding intervenes and breathes life into Zelda, plotting her escape from the game world. What happens when a protagonist is removed from their original context and placed in an entirely disparate milieu? Can a character “survive” outside of the hands of its storyteller? Despite Zelda’s monologue, shots of the virtual film set serve as reminders that her character development is limited to the boundaries of the camera frame. To challenge this hierarchy, Gjerding bestows a glass eye to Zelda. The offering is an attempt to show empathy towards her protagonist by allowing her to meet the viewer’s gaze or look beyond the lens if she so pleases. Nevertheless the tool functions as nothing more than an artificial human eye for the virtual game character. This is the trapping of storytelling: agency as prosthesis. In her fictitious runaway, Zelda ascertains, “If I am not found, I can stay an image. […] If I am not found, I will not be recognized.” Not being fully seen in the gaze of others engenders possibilities for the beginning of another story.
Images today are, quite literally, in constant motion, pulsating through millions of user devices and transfiguring so that the initial context is compressed, becoming unrecognizable and perhaps even meaningless. The act of juxtaposing and re-contextualizing images becomes the catalyst for inciting new ideas and meanings to propagate. Does the originality of an image hold as much significance in this viral and intricate that images undergo? Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (1920-1929), Gjerding responds to the contemporary condition in which every image, whether personal or public, is virally recycled, vulnerable to becoming a mere self-referential entity. Warburg had arranged images into ‘plates’ to trace the interconnectivity of cultural memory and symbols beyond the linear chronology of art history. Similarly, each of Gjerding’s videos can be seen as a Warburgian plate in its own right, reflecting her exploration of the interplay between image and context. For example, in Homage to Airway (2019), Zelda spawns as a stone statue with the legs of Sandro Botticelli’s Venus, an arm of Friedrich Wilhelm Wolff’s anesthetized bear, and a ‘broken face (gueule cassée).’ She manifests a multitude of timelines as embodied form, like an exquisite corpse of hybrid visual iconography.
Gjerding adopts a pluriversal approach in de-domesticating history, where diegesis is collective and iterative, actively necessitating the collaboration of others. This is exemplified in Broken Telephone (2023), a 3D-printing of a Neolithic person whose appearance was speculated sequentially in order of a game designer, an organization specializing in facial reconstructions of prehistoric humans, and Gjerding herself. The origin of the bust derives from A Piano is Too Heavy to Carry (2022), where we encounter a female who takes on multiple labels – she is a gatherer, as defined by Ursula K. Le Guin, a gleaner as articulated by Agnes Varda, as well as a hunter-gatherer of the Neolithic era. Gjerding splices sleek, 3D-animated scenes of the figure air playing an invisible piano and picking seeds from an imaginary plot together with abstract shots of floating objects expressed in colorful pointillism against a black background. They appear like seeds that are yet to bloom, or pixels – delicate and vulnerable data points – in the cosmic underbelly of technology awaiting its string of coding to make sense or use of them. By the end, our protagonist’s harvest reaping culminates in a dramatic ballad, the performative conveyance of which sends her tumbling to the floor, drained of energy.
Along with a collection of images waiting to be woven into a narrative, a flute can be found in the carrier bag. Sometimes it is neither image nor word but simply sound itself that can truly withhold the complexities of our experiences. In The Luxury of Choosing Pain (2019), the leaves of potted plants rustle in tones that produce a flute-like sound, highlighting wind instruments as amplifiers of breath. The wind stirs the fur of Zelda’s burly bear arm, while the rest of her body, monumentalized in concrete, remains motionless. The airy breath of the plants reverberates to Little Body, No Sound (2022), which appears like a discovered artifact on display in a museum where the stagnant atmosphere outweighs its music. Yet the budding of tiny underwater plants on the flute seem to tell us a story in globular echoes. The introspective soundscapes in each of the videos remind us that sound is a device of communication that punctures through time and space, one that the natural world has used to connect with its surroundings – including us – since the beginning of life on Earth.
As Le Guin shares with us in her seminal essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), though foraging seeds may not make as exciting of a story as that of a hunter’s tale, the act of gathering, preserving, and sharing opens us up to a myriad of ways we can engage with the world around us. For Gjerding, a lion and a dog, Airway and Dr. Guedel, Zelda and a Neolithic woman, an eye and a lip, a seed and a data bit, all exist in the same orbital configuration where they maintain a rhythmic pull and pull motion caused by the fluctuating gravitational forces between them. When we can restore images of the past and prompt an AI to generate images that do not exist at the click of a button, the responsibility for the narrative we choose to share carries greater weight than ever before. Stories are born and cultivated collectively. What do images hold? Images hold time. Time is beholden to the storyteller, and it yearns to linger in this exhibition with the lightness of an exhale, a whisper, a story.
– Dayun Ryu (류다연), curator
The text was originally written in 2023 as part of Sophia Ioannou Gjerding’s solo exhibition《LOAD: 미래수렵채집사회》in Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, South Korea.