Curator: Alexandra Larsson Jacobson. Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger, 2020.
Alexandra Larsson Jacobson
Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger, 2020
2 February - 9 March 2023
Art/Sensation Cube
HD video, digital installation, 08:39 min, loop. 2020.
Music: Mira Eklund
Curator: Susanne Fessé
Digital production: Untold Garden, Art/Sensation
Digital developer: Sol Sarratea
Form: Elin Mejergren
Text Editor: Caitlin E. Littlewood
Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger
The video work Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger (2020) can be seen as reflecting the grey area in which love, tenderness, physical closeness, and violence exist side by side. Alexandra Larsson Jacobson’s work raises questions both about and how different stages of a relationship can manifest and the ways in which boundaries rapidly shift without us being aware of a presumptive shift in power. Is it play or seriousness we’re seeing? The characters in the video work try their hand at using each other’s bodies as instruments. The work can be viewed as a stage of what it has been like, what it is like, or what it could be like in a relationship. One person is the perpetrator and one a victim, or do the two characters play dual roles? The actors continuously switch places with each other, they show love that can also be interpreted as being suffocating. To want to hold on but at the same time let go, the desire to own another human being, but at the same time to play no part in the relationship. To both love and fear, everything fits in the work in a wordless choreography.
The lenses of our eyes, if tightened, can make our surroundings fuzzy. A camera can replace the viewer’s eyes and do the same with the depth of field; the technology so becomes part of our perception. We see blurred shapes of pink and blue circles, accompanied by suggestive music where sounds from the space are partially incorporated. We see parts of a home, small porcelain figurines, a piano, a chair. Or rather, symbols of a home, a doll’s house where everything is sparkly clean and coloured in the owner’s favour, pink and blue. Lastly a sculpture cast in steel, both rigid and malleable, taking on its stature at human height.
Two women move around the rooms, one younger and one older, their age difference difficult to determine. Both have blonde hair, wear black polo tops, pink pants and orange socks. The women embrace each other and hug seemingly too tightly. The tenderness between the characters seamlessly devolves into them holding onto each other too firmly, then again returns to tenderness. The interaction between them sometimes turns into physical violence, as one woman drags the other across the floor. The glances between them suggest otherwise, is it love, tenderness, friendship? Both players interact with the sculpture in the room, which moulds itself to their physical resistance. It exists between the bodies, is used as physical pressure, and at the same time is juxtaposed against a soft cheek. The characters’ long hair comes in between, the sound of steel rustling, like a fork pulling against a plate, a sound cutting through consciousness.
The lighting acts as a filter, a fiction and distance to a reality. The pink and blue colours add to this feeling as well. The title; Harder, Softer, Slower, Stronger reflects the direction that Larsson Jacobson gave to the actors during the filming; - take harder, - caress softer. The work can be seen to be raising issues of violence, turning these issues into something we can talk about, albeit without having the right answers.
The video work is presented in a 3D environment that can be likened to a cave, a parallel reality, an inner world, which can only be accessed by the viewer at great magnification. The viewer, like Alice in Wonderland, follows the sound to descend into a shape, placed in a black cube. A room of its own, a cave where no one sees and no one hears what is happening between two people.
Alexandra Larsson Jacobson received a Master’s degree at Konstfack in Stockholm (2020) in art and a Bachelor of Fine Art from Umeå University (2012). She is also trained in Photography at the Photo School STHLM (2008). Larsson Jacobson’s background in dance has come to characterise her work as she creates encounters between human bodies, sculpture, movement and space that she describes as filmed performance. Her work has been exhibited nationally and abroad in Stockholm, Halmstad, Falkenberg, Umeå, Uppsala, Helsinki, Bangkok, Kiev and Bratislava.
Susanne Fessé, Curator
