Eva la Cour

I am a Danish visual artist and PhD (HDK-Valand, The Faculty for Fine, Applied and Performing Arts Gothenburg University, 2022), also trained in media and visual anthropology (Freie Universität in Berlin, 2012). Drawing from both of these fields, my PhD thesis Geo-Aesthetical Discontent: Svalbard, the Guide and Post-Future Essayism, investigates ‘live editing’ as a performative and situated filmic expression and method upon terrains with colonial history for visual production.

As an artist I am recurrently collaborating with friends, colleagues and becoming acquittances, interested in temporal and relational forms of the image and image-practices. Drawing inspiration from strategies of montage, and using analogue film, video, text and display aesthetic elements, my works and performative demonstrations are often effects of lengthy and multifaceted investigative processes: E.g. in the archives of the National Museum of Denmark, at a research station in Greenland or among taxi drivers on Svalbard. Out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the representational discourse, and its historical and colonial legacy, I seek for methodological reorientation of linear storylines towards new constellations between thinking and image, archive and social process, authenticity and authority. The navigation of relations, is often, in some way or another, a key concern in my individual work as well as in collaborative efforts across disciplinary affinities.

Over the past ten years, I have exhibited internationally but also developed a consistent writing practice, as well as a role as educator and organizer. In addition, I have an ongoing collaboration with filmmaker and visual artist Tinne Zenner (since 2018).

Propelled by the acute ecological crisis my research moves between artistic affinities and academic disciplines to intervene in imaginaries of Svalbard as an Arctic place. Designed as an iterative set of artistic practice experiments with live editing, the aim is to demonstrate a Geo-Aesthetical Discontent – a dissatisfying lack in the representational discourse – upon terrains with colonial history for visual production.

By subverting the historically monolithic and singular narrative of the Arctic, the artistic research unsettles the traditional exemplars of the artist and the scientist. Rather it mobilizes The Guide as an analytical figure and tool with which to propose a Post-Future Essayism: a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image; a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect that seeks to navigate and negotiate the role of film in relation to a historiographic concept of futurity.

The research, then, is a response to my discontentment with current portrayals of the Arctic that produce the region as an outside to the global west. At stake is to connect the production of an artistic practice – significantly explored in relation to historical image-makers such as Jette Bang, Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – and the production of the Arctic.