In the worlds that Rasmus Ramö Streith builds, semi-revealed reality forms a bond with imagination. There is something there, but it doesn’t announce itself. Or something was there and left behind scraps of food and entertainment. Or maybe it will return to the wanderings of its dormant brain. The Malmö-based artist’s practice plays with incertitude about spatial presence and absence.

I see story-telling as fundamental to my work. I create scenes, atmospheres or impressions associated with a place or an object. In my work I allow the worlds of sculpture and cinema to come together. A sculptural object may open up a space on a symbolical level while a film is more controlled or framed in relation to our experience of it. Movements, cuts and time present themselves to us as already packaged. On the screen, large or small, we see something finished and synchronised; space is flat and the set is shown from pre-conceived angles. Yet it is exciting to imagine what you might experience if you take a step sideways and the illusion of reality in the film is broken. They way I see it, there is something sculptural about cinema and there is something cinematic about sculpture. The process of building a set, of creating a world and transforming something – that is what drives me.

Before creating the scenes I take many notes and make many sketches. I collect objects, newspaper cuttings, images from the Internet. I save everything in a kind of reference archive, and then I start to sift through things without knowing for sure what the connections between them with be. After a while my associative work begins to take shape, and thereafter something that might become a work.

In the artist’s film- and object-based installations we are faced with events taking place among everyday elements. These are dreamily familiar signs in a world that is at the same time known and unknown.

An idea often originates with the experience of an object, a scene, a line of text, a face – something that feels weird but also convincing. When two things meet that shouldn’t function together and something ordinary and almost non-descript is placed in a new situation, that can create a certain tension that interests me.

The narrative of a space is a frequent point of departure for my installations, determining how the works will be placed and experienced. The stillness and silence of objects sometimes make them uncanny, but at the same time they work as clues or portals to other worlds and memories. When I work with objects the sense of ‘surface’ is important to me, their textures, marks, lesions and wounds, their decay. I believe I’m driven towards a desire to humanise them.

The exhibition ‘The set is a skull’ at Kohta borrows its title from Paul McCarthy’s description of his installations and performance videos. What happens in his constructed interiors is compared to the impressions and dreams that play within a skull.

To me the title works as an image within an image, like a Gothic novel where the main character gets lost inside its own Self. A number of years ago I read in the American author Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain (1985) that space, much like the Self, envelops the body, but that windows and doors enable the Self to move out into the world and at the same time allow it to come inside. In Scarry’s description space is an enlargement of the body, but also a miniature of the world.

‘The set is a skull’ references the history of cinema. Since its break-through around 1910, the moving image has become part of humankind’s collective memory and reality.

In Streith’s emblematic video work The Un dead (2018), around which the exhibition at Kohta was structured, events take place in a haunted house. It is as if the ‘skull’ is twirling in black space, and we are given access to its strange dreams through the orifices of its windows/eyes.

The initial idea for The Un Dead was that it would become an adaptation of a Dracula film. This both happened and didn’t happen. I had set myself some goals before starting the project, such as working with real people and record all scenes in a studio, creating visual effects in front of the camera.

I have worked with my interest in materiality, the physically palpable, for the sound and light as well as for the acting. Stage design and framing are of central importance and were inspired by German expressionist films like Nosferatu (1922) by F. W. Murnau and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) by Robert Wiene.

The Un dead slowly developed into a film about repetition and an ambiguous and ambivalent state, a glitch. Something that doesn’t feel entirely right but is nevertheless relatable.

I wanted to use an older camera and ended up with VHS technology. Partly because of the format, the process of handling the cassettes and nostalgia for my own childhood. The ‘bad’ quality offered by the VHS camera added something to the narrative. Bleeding colours and fuzzy sharpness generated layers and lent the material a sensation of past time. At the same time we are reminded that this is artificial and constructed. A world in lo-rez.

I targeted amateur actors and held auditions with them. In that situation I was the animator, relating to the actors as if they were dolls. In the video they move like machines or animated still images. That is how I imagined their choreography. People and furniture change places.

The sound in the film is a character of its own. If the people resemble furniture, the sound comes across as sculpture.

I like the idea to separate the sound from the image and that the sound adds something separate, that it doesn’t do the same as the image. There is nothing illustrative in their encounter. The creaking of the sofa is not a creaking sofa. The flat image grows a body. Recording the sound was an intuitive process. We brought a number of things into the studio: tennis balls, bowls, pieces of clothing, carrots, old porridge that had been standing for a while – but it turned out not to be of much use. These were objects we had around us. There wasn‘t supposed to be many sounds, just one or two at any given time. I wanted the soundscape to appear close and isolated.

The artistic process, like Streith’s work, insists on an advanced stage of unfinishedness. Something was begun but the case remains unsolved.

I was struck by an image I came across, showing some of the artist Katarina Fritsch’s sculptural moulds stacked on freight pallets in her studio. The caption mentioned ‘unfinished’ sculptures. I began to reflect on my own process and how my works find themselves in a seemingly unfinished ‘behind the scenes’ situation. I’m attracted to that openness and what it potentially does for the experience of a work: not to be in a stage of closure.

I’m now working on a new film project: a process that is always time-consuming, at least for me. I’m drawing different scenes that form a mosaic-like pattern when they come together. The idea is to create an infinite order, as when light hits a crystal. This project is quite different from The Un dead, but there are points of contact. This time the ‘actor’ is centre-stage and the mask is a kind of set design. The characters will change and develop thematically, but also visually. If the title for the exhibition at Kohta references a set mirroring what is happening inside our skulls, then the visual landscape of my new project is itself more like a mirror.

Emily Fahlén

Emily Fahlén is an independent curator, educator and writer. She is the founding director of Mint, situated in the Workers Educational Association’s building in central Stockholm. Focusing on art, poetry and sound, her curatorial work embraces experimental practices, cross-generational encounters and site-specific interventions.