COLONIAL SURFER - The ReSearch

“Every living thing has two bodies. To be an animal is to be in possession of a physical body, a body which can eat, drink and sleep; it is also to be embedded in a worldwide network of ecosystems. When every human body has an uncanny global presence, how do we live with ourselves?” From a presentation of Daisy Hildyards essay and book The Second Body, Fitzcarraldo Editions.

You are surfing waves with your first body. And it is about visual representation when the first body gets photographed.

Your second body is about a large number of connections in networks that is best represented through calculations and numbers of effects and consequences from your way of living.

In surfing, the first body is getting celebrated (as well as in Yoga). Sometimes in ways that deny and hide the second body. Is your first body, or your second body the more political one? Is the picture of your first body of more impact and more political than your first body itself? Is your second body the most political one?

Is your first body, or your second body the best surfer? Is your first body or your second body a colonial surfer?

There are a lot of people trimming and exercising their first bodies without worrying about how their second bodies are unhealthy in obesity and overweight.

The video HEROES “All we do is surf ” is an early mashup* work from 2004. I have been setting rules while editing the material consisting of surf films, and the most important rule has been about deleting all scenes with surf waves. By regularly doing this, other parts of the films are getting compressed and more in focus. Perspective on the homosocial community, gender roles, representation, and power perspectives are being clarified and perceived to be overplayed. At the same time is the video becoming something that is very much like every day popular culture. But since the intended main content of these videos is missing, the viewer’s perspective changes. I want to shift the viewer’s gaze to a problematizing and deconstructing perspective.

The material used is films that show impressive waves, cool maneuvers and a quick portrayal of surfers and lifestyles. Films that are there to inspire and sell the sport sponsored by various companies. I’ve grown up with watching these types of videos in skateboarding and snowboarding. Films that are done through a collage way of film-editing, rather than being about narratives. But the perspective became different for me when I saw surf films in public in Bali, Indonesia, 2001. Unequal representation became very obvious. Such as racial profiling while portraying surfers travelling the world. This is something I later explored more closely when I studied at the School of Photography in Gothenburg University 2004-2007.

When our surroundings are getting photographed and filmed, it is not only about depiction. Reality is getting generated through the mediated perspectives and their structures. This exerts displacements and involves performative action. We are often blind to its ideology when this happens through what is ideal, or something we experience as just normal.

*Video mashup as a cultural phenomenon on the Internet grew strongly during the early 2000s but died out a few years ago on platforms such as Youtube through unfavorable copyright filtering systems. At the same time, there are specific laws written today to protect mashup as cultural expression and art form. But some online filters are today more restrictive and ungainly than the laws.

In surf culture, the term Perfect is used extensively as a superlative: “It was perfect, perfect conditions, perfect waves.” Perfect as a superlative means somehow that nothing needs to change.

This word contrasts in each monochrome as the letters are in exact complement color against the single-colored surfaces. This turns into a closed circuit in light. Precise complementary colors and photographs that do not seek to capture moments but instead exact meetings – a sculpture of photography.

Photography as a medium has, in our time, begun to lose its connection with a historical past more and more. It is no longer about when photographs are getting shot that is essential, but rather when they are getting shared and in what contexts. If you push this a bit in theory, the historical nostalgic aspect, which was previously characteristic of photography, changes and becomes instead a constant here and now.

On the walls, these photographs hang in different constellations, and in different numbers, depending on how they play with the rest of the room. In terms of content, they repeat exactly, except that the colors differ considerably. The exact color coordinates are also inscribed in the titles. The images consist of monochrome surfaces and on each surface the word Perfect is written with Helvetica as the font.

Technically, they are made digitally, and then printed at a professional photo lab. Although the light is important, there is no camera involved and as a photographic genre it is about technical images. The pictures represent an exact meaning and content. As written; It is not a photographic practice attempting to convey moments. These are photographs that want to create exact meetings.

The title The global village is taken from a book by Marshall McLuhan from 1968. I am researching the island of Bali as a global node of mediation. I am doing this through photography, focusing mostly on already existing images in public space. Bali is an island where the effects of globalization are clearly visible. With this project, I depict and ask questions about the globalized information society. The project is about Bali, but at the same time about the world we all live in and share, but not in equal matters. The situation is far from fair. Bali is a small island where several of the world’s richest investors own land. Over time, more and more gated communities and fenced areas have been developed and built on the island. At the same time with those barriers and walls, there are ideas of freedom, liberalism, and boundlessness getting expressed and fabricated on Bali in a neo-liberal manner.

When I organize a material of very many pictures that forms the basis of the project The Global Village - Bali, I use a program that does not operate perfectly all the time: the program freezes and the screen glitches. When I on one occasion could read Massage written in one of these glitches, I made a screenshot. Although I have read Marshall McLuhan, it was this picture that taught me that the title of McLuhan’s best-known book is The Medium is The Massage, not The Medium is The Message, which is his theoretical thesis and one of McLuhan's most famous statements. Although I know that the program malfunction, I continue to use it to generate more glitches. The glitches are of importance since they show the interface of the images that is otherwise hidden in the illusion of the photographs. It is similar to when I photograph pictures and the viewer becomes aware of the surfaces of the images, the scratches and the materiality. They are not see-through images.

27 March a backpack get placed on Charles de Gaulle airport in France around 14:30–15:00 as a deliberate act and an attack.

Charles de Gaulle is one of Europe’s most supervised airports. A person puts down and leaves a backpack in the airport. Before leaving, the person photographs the bag. This action shows the surveillance cameras that everything is intentional and that the backpack is not forgotten. The bag is closed and locked with a padlock in the zipper opening. This means that it cannot be easily opened. The backpack is meant as an attack in the airport. “For security reasons, baggage left unattended will be removed and destroyed.” Studies of art, photography, postcolonial theory and my own experience of traveling as a tourist in Asia are behind my decision to perform the action. I am convinced that the action is worth doing for a number of important reasons. Placing the bag like this at Charles de Gaulle airport can scare, shock and hurt individuals. A part of the airport may be blocked by the security guards and people on their way to or from their flights might be disturbed. The ethical problem of exposing other people to my actions is included in my calculations. I justify the action with theories of how the system itself is so much more violent, wrong and destructive. The contents of the backpack are pictures. These images consist of scanned material from travel brochures and travel commercials printed on photo paper and then cropped to a 10x15cm format. Nothing but a large number of these pictures lies in the bag. The selection is made to represent a typical representation of the world through a European travel commercial perspective. The backpack contains something that the tourism industry generates, images that constitute the current world order. The security system, the structure, and the strictly disciplined architecture are tangible. I’m up in this with intentions about it as art. Flying with the bag containing only pictures is part of a performance work. Passing the bag through the X-ray machine at the airport worries me. Perhaps I will face suspicion and questions. I’m afraid to be remembered, or that security staff should notice this as something strange so that I can later be linked to the Charles de Gaulle airport attack and seized as a terrorist.

Houses and hotels with sea views are highly valued. But if a house is considered to be isolated from a center, its economic value will fall. More recently, from a global perspective, statistics have shown the connection between houses located near good surf spots and rising economic value.

Bali is a small island in Indonesia that has been completely transformed through the tourism industry. The mass tourism of this island began with wave surf tourism. And it’s a common saying that it started after the premiere of the surf movie Morning of The Earth (1972). The film contains footage from Bali as an unexploited beautiful and harmonic paradise with amazing waves. Bali has since developed into a Mecca for surf culture. A lot of Balinese locals are currently protesting publicly against the extensive exploitation of the island. They point to the international tourism industry, the ruling economic elite and the political power of Jakarta as responsible. The problems that the locals address, among other things, are that they themselves become invisible, run over by the ruling elite, without getting their own say. As an artist I explore colonial heritage and trends through a globalized surf culture. Is surf culture so dominant that in some cases it displaces other cultural expressions? I recently met an established art curator (producer) from Jakarta, Indonesia. She did a presentation of her work in Stockholm, Sweden. One of her subject matters was Indonesia’s current relation to a colonial history and the colonizers. During the presentation I wrote down notes and some questions to ask. My first question was about the protest-movement “Tolak-Reklamasi” in Bali. She didn’t really want to say or answer anything about this ongoing movement and she declared the Island to exoticized and too much of bad taste to discuss. My answer back was that the Island still exist no matter if you consider it bad taste or not. In a critical part of a discussion that followed from this, the curator pronounces something very remarkable with stating these exact words: “There are no locals in Bali.” I got stunned by the statement. What does she really mean? No matter how you twist and turn on this statement, it is very problematic and oppressive. Not at least when one of the main messages of the demonstrating Balinese is: “We exist!” The Balinese is a minority (Hinduism religious minority) in Indonesia.

The segregation and gentrification in Bali are evident today. Gentrification is a displacement process. Those who are not financially strong enough to buy houses, pay rent or live the everyday life in an area are getting displaced. Profits on rising square meter prices control the development. This leads to consequences for the cultural identity of places since the variation in residents is replaced by one and the same class. In certain areas of Bali it means that the tourism-industry is pushing away the locals. In general terms is gentrification processes especially evident and strong in central cities, but also along ocean coastal stretches. Is it possible to say that surf culture is part of, and accelerates, gentrification processes? This considering how places around good surf spots are attractive and how they are used. Those areas are nowadays, in cases when there are no laws protecting them, getting privatized. Is access to the great open sea and the waves a class issue in an economically neo-liberal world?