Svälten

Performative installation
26-31 August 2024
Kompanihuset Malmö


PRODUCTION TEAM

Annie Eliasson, text,concept,set
Johannes Ekdahl Du Rietz, composer
Amanda Lebert, light,technician
Maja Ellborg, Producer
Gabriella Marmén, dramaturgy


Teater Kreatur  performers
Maja Ellborg
Kalle Syri
Linda Blom


Lena Bergendahl,photography


LINKS
 
VIDEO
Svälten excerpt
somliga måste vara fattiga somliga rika

MUSIC
music (Johannes Ekdahl Du Rietz)

människan är likt;
en råvara,flytande utan framtid
om hon lämnas utan översyn kärleksfull rättrådig översyn

Svälten is an immersive performance- and installation piece that re-tells the history of the famine in Sweden and Finland during the late 1800s.

Based on research ranging from historical novels and popular science books to archival material, Annie Eliasson has written a poetic manuscript that blends and collages together disparate testimonies and fragmented histories into a narrative. She invited the composer Johannes Ekdahl Du Rietz to set passages of the text to music and collaborated with the performance group Teater Kreatur to perform and bring the text alive.

Set on two floors in the historic building Kompanihuset in Malmö, the audience finds themself in a world that is not quite now and not quite then, an odd juxtaposition between built environments that allude to vernacular traditions meeting modern technology; a coffee grinder spins on its own, the performers film their environment with iphones, projecting imagery onto the set, while a bass-player performs a song.

The set is a built environment of sculptures made of everyday objects, toys and natural material. Set against painted fabrics and papers, water drips from somewhere in the room, a candle is lit on a sculpture. The audience encounters the human seen through the eyes of ‘the people’ or through ‘Svamppredikanten’ (The Fungae-envangelist) ; a character distilled from the predjudice and disregard often expressed by the ruling class towards the common-folk.

Through the text a tactile universe emerges, of the shapes, colours and textures of nature, wet and drowned, dry and feeble, cold and muted. Recounting the weathers and seasons, the sentiments of the people, superstition mixed with everyday life.

Svälten is artistically grappling with the notion of what happens when the human is reduced to a machine or an animal,when death lurks at every corner and man needs to ration himself and cut down not only on food but also what it means to be human; when man is not only stripped of the basic necessities but also its fundamental right to live.

This project is realised through archival material
and researchers at;


             

Åbo Academy
Archive Cultura
Swedish-Finnish Textile Archive      
Finnish Literature Society  (SKS) Helsinki
Swedish Literature Society in Finland (SLS) Helsinki