Asset. Everything used. All as it used to be. (2024)
Video installation, 15 min, various dimensions
Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark, 2024
The video installation examines the diverse dimensions of collecting, exploring collections contained in private households and those in museums. In doing so, it highlights the intertwined relationship between people and things. In Asset. Everything used. All as it used to be., collections become more than passive objects. They acquire an agency and a monstrosity that extends beyond the things themselves, shaking dichotomies between the individual and the group, preservation and disappearance, the user and the used.
Asset. Everything used. All as it used to be. takes its departure in a personal story. One day in 2020, a woman in her 80s decides to clean 7 spoons which were a gift given to her by her grandmother in the 1960s. She believes they are silver but, when she dips the first spoon into a can of silver polish, it vanishes. The woman is Hanne Ioannou, my grandmother.
What was considered a valuable object suddenly becomes something else. The spoon falls apart, but then restores itself. Through an animated narrative it lives for a while among other things: a rotary dial phone, spinach bouquets, a cloak, a hat, a pair of trousers, and shoes.
From this vantage point, the video installation considers different things that we consider to be heritage: from the spoon from my grandmother to the inherited knowledge about insects from an entomological collection at the University of Lund (where a large proportion of their specimens were donated by “amateur collectors”). It then begins to explore how our relationship to objects and other beings are influenced by video games, and in particular how certain video games mirror the act of gathering or foraging, but to the extent to which it becomes hoarding.
A single detail becomes a hinge between scenarios. We shift from the collected specimen of the now-extinct butterfly Xerxes to hoarding of assets within the world of video games. A lone wolf talks about swarms and packs. Collections question what conservation means in an age of eco-crisis, the value of objects, and the idea of individualized heroism. Heritage becomes entangled with fantasy, the heroic with the domesticated, accumulation with loss. Through this, the film highlights how, in themselves, collections can dissolve its own categorization and act as storytelling devices in a world of disappearance and rupture.
Part of the exhibition Ensembles and Monsters in Kunsthal Aarhus, curated by Seolhui Lee.
Written and directed: Sophia Ioannou Gjerding
Voice acting (wizard and lone wolf): Liz Fodor
Model-making and stop motion animation: Kristina Stengaard
Costume design: Aroque Kwon
Sound Engineer: Xenia Xamanek Lopez
3D Generalist, Motion Capture Setup: Nicoline Lind
CGI, 2D animation, film recording: Sophia Ioannou Gjerding
In-game footage recorded in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Stage construction and technical assistance by Joaquin Zaragoza and Leonardo Sagastuy
Special thanks to:
Hanne Ioannou
Jadranka Rota and the Entomological Collections at Lunds University
Moesgaard Museum
Natural History Museum of Aarhus
WiredFly
Supported by Statens Kunstfond, Aarhus Municipality, Augustinus Foundation, Beckett-Foundation and Knud Højgaards Foundation.
Untitled, 2024. Installation, variable materials and sizes.
In collaboration with Kristina Stengaard (model making) and Aroque Kwon (costumes). The work is exhibited in boxes previously used to store bone preparations from the Natural History Museum in Aarhus.
Hero #6, 2024. Pigment print, CGI, 100 x 100 cm.
The work is exhibited in a transport crate from the Moesgaard Museum magazines. Courtesy of the museum.
Untitled, 2024. Installation, variable materials and sizes.
In collaboration with Kristina Stengaard (model making) and Aroque Kwon (costumes). The work is exhibited in boxes previously used to store bone preparations from the Natural History Museum in Aarhus.
Hero #6, 2024. Pigment print, CGI, 100 x 100 cm.
The work is exhibited in a transport crate from the Moesgaard Museum magazines. Courtesy of the museum.
In collaboration with Kristina Stengaard (model making) and Aroque Kwon (costumes). The work is exhibited in boxes previously used to store bone preparations from the Natural History Museum in Aarhus.
The work is exhibited in a transport crate from the Moesgaard Museum magazines. Courtesy of the museum. Photo: Jacob Friis-Holm Nielsen.
