The House That Whispers


2021 // A three channel video installation // 15:30 min loop

A multichannel soundscape about the reverberations of the colonization of the Danish West Indies, today the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The film stages interactions between the past, present and what seem to be echoes of history, manifested in law, architecture, and people.

The video installation was filmed in three locations around Copenhagen.



Installation view at The Royal Casting Collection, SMK, Copenhagen part of kulturnatten 2021



The West Indies Warehouse


The West Indies Warehouse, located on the waterfront in Copenhagen, was built by the Danish West India Company, a chartered company responsible for the Triangular trade.

This film started as a sound recording, made in 2019, of the West Indies Warehouse building singing. The phenomenon of the building singing happens in special weather conditions where wind enters the building, causing it to resonate and become its own instrument playing in several flute-like tonalities. The field recording was made in The Royal Cast Collection which the warehouse houses today. 





The Odd Fellow Palace


The Odd Fellow Palace was bought in 1762 by Heinrich von Schimmelmann and at the time got the name Schimmelmann Mansion. In the 18th century, the Schimmelmann family had become Denmark’s richest family due to sugar imports from the Danish West Indies.

Sitting by a piano at The Odd Fellow Palace, pianist Ben Besiakov improvises in direct response to the recording of the sound sung by the West India Warehouse building. Ben Besiakov’s grandfather was Victor Cornelin. Victor Cornelin was brought from the Danish West Indies to Copenhagen to be exhibited at the 1905 human exhibition in Tivoli.


The Royal Vajsenhus


In 1905 The Royal Vajsenhus was an orphanage and after the human exhibition in Tivoli Victor Cornelin was sent to school in this very building. Today The Royal Vajsenhus is a primary school.

In the film a girl reads aloud from a contemporary school book for high school history classes. From the book, she reads a selection of texts. One of which is the 1733 slave regulations of Philip Gardelin that were put in force throughout the Danish West Indies, while another is the story of Victor Cornelin. 





The three channels mixed into one TRAILER 




CREDITS 
artist
Julie Nymann

pianist
Ben Besiakov

girl
Luka Ildrup

photographer
Jonas Fogh

assistant
Ellinor Juhler

editor
Anna Wistreich
Julie Nymann

sound designer
Jonathan Hvalsøe Schou

colorist
Eliott Becheau
thank you
The Royal Cast Collection, The Odd Fellow Palace, The Royal Vajsenhus

thank you
Henrik Holm, Jakob Kolding, Luca Frei, Stephen William McEvoy, Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Kasper Wolf Stouenborg, Kristine Bech, Nikolaj Nielsen Phillipsen, Mathias Bruun, Anne Mette Finderup, Naja Berg Hougaard











Use It Well


By Julie Nymann & Signe Raunkjær Holm


2022 // 16-channel sound installation // 30 min loop + 5 min exit track

Use It Well’ is a 16 speakers installation distributed throughout a room where the audience is invited to walk among the speakers.

A group of people reacted to a casting call titled “experiment about dance and loneliness” during lockdown 2021. They were invited to the fictional ‘Red Room Institute’ that hosted something between a dance audition, a self-help radio show, and a performance for a one-person audience. This turned into ‘Use It Well’, where the spectator is surrounded by a massive soundscape of bodies.

The soundscape oscillates between inner comments and attempts of reaching out, verbal and nonverbal communication, loneliness and togetherness.

By leaving the visual space empty for the audience to fill in the blanks, ‘Use It Well’ wants to reconfigure ideas of presence and absence, intimacy and distance, and how we construct meaning when something is withheld from us. What happens to the representation of the bodies when the visual codes are removed?




Documentation of in-house presentation at Inter Arts Center. All the people you see are visitors interacting with the sound installation.



To enter the installation the spectator must put on a pair of pink socks on.

The spectator exits through a corridor with hidden speakers, listening to the directing voices of the live performance.




CREDITS
artists
Julie Nymann &
Signe Raunkjær Holm

composition ‘Give Us Your Echo’
Lennart Dybdahl

vocals ‘Give Us Your Echo’ 
Signe Raunkjær Holm

sound design
Eliza Bożek

thanks
the performers
thanks
Luca Frei, Jonas Jönsson, Ellinor Juhler, Stephen McEvoy, Alessandro Perini, Jenny Gräf Sheppard, Christian Skovbjerg Jensen, Ragna Solbergnes

with support from
Koda Kultur
Dansk Komponistforening
Inter Arts Center













Lungs of salt


2021 // A two channel video installation // 27:00 min loop

In a dance where the human compass is uncalibrated and every sense of direction has disappeared, we plunge ever deeper, exploring the unknown ocean’s underworld of fantasies, and mythical projections of human desires into layered waters.

In ‘Lungs of salt’, it feels as if synthetic utopia is a natural part of the ocean waters. Neon jellyfish and fabrics like chiffon, organza and silk react to the current of the ocean, merging man-made hybrids with an ecology of sparkling desires. The fabric moves between awareness of a man-made material produced by an industrial machine, and a souled sea serpent that reigns over the ocean.






Installation view of ‘Lungs of salt’ at M/S Maritime Museum, 2021


The round shape of the installation at M/S Maritime Museum, makes it feel as if the film is one breathing organ, enhanced by the meditative soundscape, where the passage of time slips into a distorted eye.

The textiles and garment industry is one of the largest users of water globally, with tons of water being used to produce a kilogram of fibre inorder to become fabric. The materials used in this film are directly linked to the desire of luxurious materials, returned to the waters the industry exploits.
This conflict frames the core of the underworld, where we dive ever deeper into the uninhabitable human place, the sea, that bridges to a new habitat that seems easy to ingest.

The spectator floats through the ocean, not realizing it is the danish sea they are experiencing, and that every time the film cuts, a new breath is taken. Clad in hunting wetsuits, the crew lie in the ocean recording ‘Lungs of salt’, simultaneously connected to the fabrication industry that produces the wetsuit material. ‘Lung of salt’ streams into an industrial utopia that is ever connected to water and it’s technology.



TRAILER of ‘Lungs of salt’ at M/S Maritime Museum


CREDITS
artist
Julie Nymann

dancers
Mia Heide
Karoline Christensen


photographer
Jonas Fogh

music
SØS Gunver Ryberg

scenographer
Mette Moltke Wozniak

edit
Julie Nymann

colorgrader
Eliott Becheau

Made possible by
M/S Maritime Museum
thank you
Marie Ørstedholm
Maria Mackinney-Valentin

Signe Raunkjær Holm
Ellinor Juhler
Nina  Balstrup
Sofie Burgaard
Tilda Lundbohm

thank you
STOF & STIL
SILVAN
Dana Lim A/S











Shreds of laughter


2014 // 9:16 video // 11:31 min loop
Danish Photography ‘15, By Charlotte Præstegaard Schwartz

Julie’s challenge to the photograph as document is in a place quite different. It quickly strikes me while I look, curious and a little appalled, at Shreds of Laughter (2014) that this video is so much about the effect that the photograph as document can have. She laughs, looks as though she is enjoying herself, moves easily within the frame of the wood. She begins planing the projection of herself away. Slowly, to the sound of shredding, the image disappears.

It is physically shocking to witness how the young, delighted, laughing woman slowly disappears, shaved away by her doppelganger in a performative act. In an investigation of the energy and presumably the power of the document, Julie, with the work Shreds of Laughter, turns the focus on how identity and self-understanding can be constructed through a reflection of social surroundings, and not least through the use of media. Excerpt



Entering the installation by 3 steps the screen is raised from the ground with wood shavings on the floor. Installation view of ‘Shreds of laughter’ at Fotografisk Center, Ung dansk 15, Copenhagen




CREDITS
artist
Julie Nymann

photographer & editor
Julie Nymann

thank you
Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ithaca, USA
Mechanism Digital












Riverbed press


2016 // 16:9 video // 07:51 min loop

An interaction between machine, labor and nature: powered by my repeated labor a printmaking press transforms the natural surroundings. On the machine is a bed of running water, yet nothing gets wet. As the video progresses the performer continually adds and forces branches under the drum, crushing everything along its way.

This creates a both uncomfortable and dreamy natural soundscape as the sound of crushing reeds is pulsing alongside the trickling of running water. As the task becomes more and more mundane through its repetition, the soundtrack begins to change the viewers´ perception as a softly humming voice lures the spectator into a dream state where the action become secondary to the meditative sounds.



Installation view at Den frie udstillingsbygning, kunstnernes efterårsudstilling 2016




CREDITS
artist
Julie Nymann

photographer
Julie Nymann

assistant
Malia Jensen

editor & sound designer
Julie Nymann

thank you
The Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY, USA
Mechanism Digital












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