We descend back down the mass of rusted and definitely unsafe stairs until we reach the bottom. For me, I now felt at ease but I’m sure for most people the feeling of fear would still be present. He points out that a friend replaced the lagging around the pipes only to find out at a later date that the original lagging was asbestos. Great bloody asbestos, crafted sounds kryptonite. this is the only thing that truly stands in my way, now i truly understand the saying “suffering for your art” .
I’m now sure I will probably suffer an excruciating death like my grandfather did at the feet of asbestosis so I need to make the most of this precious time i have left. “Don’t make art which shocks people” rings in my head, I then realise what this means. It resonates that they wish to stand alone in their shock treatment, sorry but you are full of shit. We carry on our trip around the massive expanse of a building and I imagine hundreds of people rushing around like ants scurrying through corridors and towing and growing between jobs. Chris tells me that they always knew the colour of the paper being produced as the river was that colour, bright greens, blues, yellows and purples. The pollution this place made was enormous, and I would later be told that the soil in this area is badly affected and there are lots of deposits found in it. I met an artist which has a plan for an art piece and that is to collect various soil samples throughout Sweden, followed by tests to show what is contained within the soil and to then display them as a sculptural piece to bring both awareness and vision to the public and government which are in denial of this existence. I expect generations have been silently affected and this is visible with abnormalities in human forms. The building is full of heavily rusted objects and also sound producing sculptures which other artists apart from Chris have left there, almost discarded but free to experiment with. Chris starts to climb through a tight gap reminiscent of potholing and so I pluck up the courage and decide to follow like a lamb to slaughter. And wow I’m so glad i took the plunge. We are in another silo that has perfect white tiles on it, fresh as the day they were removed from the kiln and I freeze to the spot. I freeze as there is a white substance on the walls and the fear of asbestos flies back to my overwhelmed brain. chris softly says, hey ollie don't worry its only paper! We are standing in a paper mush silo, it’s a storage tank. I glance upwards when I use my wearing out torch and see a large white disc. This is when the fun really starts and I can see the smile revisiting Chris’s face. The white disc is similar in form to a drum skin where later on I see a remarkable video he made. The skin was inhabited by two dancers for a live show they did that was open to the public and was over subscribed. The sound-art-video depicts two ladies dancing in a hypnotic fashion and you can only see their shadows illuminated and projected through the skin and it is difficult to see their bodies but only their outlines or gender. Re-fucking-markable. this is what many describe as “out there”, craft; what a joke, nice shiny well made things standing truly alone by themselves, no theoretical backing, what the hell is the point? I guess that I am going to die one day and that it is unacceptable that leaving a beautiful object isn’t enough, I have the unprecedented ability to leave a theoretical legacy, one which inspires and neglects the impoverished thinking of our fore fathers, the true belief that everything is finite, that ephemera cannot truly be diminished and that we are truly alone. The certainty that life is not eternal and that it circumflexes the true injustices of social impoverity. Thus we must trust our inner judgement regardless of what others believe and we must impart this on the world which we live in regardless of whether we truly understand what we are doing. What is then point in doing something which we understand, life is a journey, art is our life, plans never work out, so plans are irrelevant if we wish to push boundaries. Boundaries are created by persons which have a common intellect, they are created for the minority of thinkers, we are not a majority or even part of it, we are merely outcasts in an abrupt and social volume of discriminations.
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