FutureEverything - winner of the Lever Prize 2010

Elsewhereness - Robert Willim and Anders Weberg

Digital Video
2008-2010
5 mins, 9 mins
Sound

The Elsewhereness series deals with questions of site specificity, juxtaposing the nomadic with the place-bound. Early site specific artworks in the 1960s – 70s were often massive in form and commented on the commodification of the prevailing artworld. In keeping with artist Richard Serra’s expression” to remove the work is to destroy the work”, most of this work was place-bound. Site specific art has since then been transformed. Often it is about the social, about engagement and relations between people living in a certain place and visiting artists.

Elsewhereness subverts these approaches. It is instead about the ephemeral, about urban alienation and non-presence. It takes the possibilities for digital media in relation to site specific art to its extremes. It is also in a way a parody of the history of site-specific art creating “one place after another”, a dynamic that Miwon Kwon writes about in her discussion of the history of site specific art (2002). Elsewhereness is about the artists NOT being there. The artists are elsewhere, touching from a distance.

The works in the Elsewhereness series are made solely from audio and videomaterial found on the web, material that emanates from a specific place. The audiovisual pieces are manipulated and composed into a surreal journey through an estranged landscape, based entirely on the culturally bound and stereotypical preconceptions of the artists about the actual location.

The finished Elsewhereness work can be downloaded into a media player or mobile phone and enjoyed when walking around the surroundings of the specific place, from which the material emanates. The first part of the series was Elsewhereness: Yokohama, commissioned by the Dislocate 08 festival in Yokohama/Tokyo. The second part was Eslewhereness:Cape Town, commissioned by Cape 09 Art Biennale, 2009, Cape Town, South Africa.

As the series expands, a number of places will be joined over time into a web of surreal associations of difference and similarity, reflecting something about the various places but also about cultural preconceptions.