The Levitating Ermine Skin and Other Digital Rituals
Interview with artist Anne Haaning, Tromsø 2021.
Written by Mihály Stefanovicz
Anne Haaning (DK) initially trained as an architect in Copenhagen. In 2004 she moved to London and began her career which led her through a number of architecture studios. Her career as an architect, which was largely focused on visualisation, came to an end in 2011, when she decided to change her path and enrolled at the MFA program of Goldsmith, University of London. In 2016 she moved to Tromsø to do her PhD at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in collaboration with Tromsø Art Academy, which she completed in 2020. Currently Haaning is working as Assistant Professor in Tromsø Art Academy. Her practice revolves around an interest in digital ontology and myth and usually employs CG animation and video installation.
In this interview Anne Haaning speaks about her art practice and the links between myths and digital space which is particularly evident in her latest work Half Hidden.
Mihály Stefanovicz: You have a reputation in the Danish art world. Besides participating in, and curating, a number of exhibitions, in 2019 your PhD work, the video Half Hidden (2019), had its first show at Den Frie in Copenhagen.
Anne Haaning: Denmark is probably where my work has the most traction – especially Half Hidden, which deals with Danish colonialism. Even if people are interested in that work here, or in London, it is not quite the same. It sort of belongs in Denmark and it was really great to see the work get so much attention and recognition there as an important contribution to the current Danish discourse in art. And ironically, even though this is the most “Danish” work I’ve ever made, I actually think it was important that I did a twenty year detour away from Denmark in order to at least attempt to look at these things from the outside.
MS: Text or audio narration is an element that you elaborately work on, and carry along with you through your practice. In the intro of the video KhoiSan Medicine (2014), you use the expression Sound-Bites, referring to its scattered narrative.
AH: In that work, I was really treating words as sound-texture. My interest in the content of the audio was more to do with its qualities as sound rather than the meaning it conveyed. I created a space that was ambiguous instead of one where a voice didactically presents you with a definite truth, as a comment, I suppose, on what goes on in the digital. Today, I’m less interested in the break-down of meaning purely as a comment on technology.
But I haven’t given up on the “sound-bites” – I still like to use this cut-up technique to create a kind of vocal rhythm for the work. In the video installation Half Hidden I used the sound-bites-technique to deconstruct a very particular story. I sourced the audio from a documentary made in the ’60s about a cryolite mine in Ivittuut, Greenland, which is a film that isn’t terribly aware of its inherent colonial gaze, and so it wasn’t trying to cover it up either. It was proud, in a way, of recording this colonial achievement. When working with this audio from the 60’s I was trying to find a way to chop it up and reassemble it in order to make those words describe the technological consequences of what happened during that time.
MS: Dematerialisation within digital space. What does that mean? You seem to provoke this subject through a variety of works: Laws of physics are deliberately mocked. Does digital space bring some sort of liberation?
AH: I think digital space promises you a degree of control.
You only need to learn how a couple a parameters work in “digital space” in order to make something look “real” and take control of it – in representation at least. I am complicit in this fantasy in the way that I am totally seduced by this promise. The control I have over my digital tools is futile in the end – I am a nobody in the bigger scheme. Meanwhile I am paying enormous amounts of money for equipment just to make content just like everybody else. And ultimately, inside this enormous hive of circulating data, does it matter what the content looks like?
MS: It apparently does matter though, doesn’t it? Take for example the scene, from Half Hidden, with the levitating ermine skin. I found it mocking and very seductive at the same time. I am not sure if it would have made the same impression with a sloppy digital representation of the skin.
AH: Talking of the ermine skin. It brings up another reappearing theme in my work – myth. In my research, I have been looking at specific myths recorded in Greenland. In the video work Half Hidden, I reference a myth by a Greenlandic shaman called Nakasuk, in it an ermine skin is used to let stone spirits in and out of a big rock. The ermine skin is magical in that it enables the shaman to perform this transitional act, until the skin gets pierced by an arrow and loses its magic power.
The myth was transcribed by Knud Rasmussen, a Danish-Greenlandic polar explorer and later on it was translated to English. So the myth has gone through two translational edits which makes me wonder how close to the original oral myth the written record is, and how much of the colonial gaze was embedded in this recording process.
But I also just like to speculate about how this myth might have functioned a century ago in the remote society that was living under colonialism in that time. Can this ritual with the skin be seen as an act of emancipation concerning the Greenlandic territory = natural resources that attracted so much colonial attention?
What also fascinates me about the myth is the way it creates a universe that is not limited by gravity and the laws of physics – here everything can happen and it’s as real as you want it to be. And this sort of takes us back to the digital promise – everything in our life is controlled by money, practicalities, schedules…etc. And maybe the digital space is the closest we can get to some form of transcendental, limitless space, at least in a technocratic culture – however commercial it is.
To return to the idea of the skin, in digital space 3D-models are just hollow shells, which are actually called skins in 3D animation. You put a skeleton inside the skin, which controls it. It is so superficial, literally, there is only a surface without content. It is the same with the ermine skin – it is also just a surface: the meat, muscles, all the life is gone, and we are stuck with the container. I think there is something telling about this hollow nature of CG (computer generated) objects.
MS: Please tell me something about the foundation of your PhD work. Where does it come from, how did the topic occur to you?
AH: When the ideas for Half Hidden emerged, I was beginning to feel a bit bored with the discussion around the digital. Until that point, I had mainly been concerned with mediation and representation in technology and I had a strong desire to leave the self-referential loop behind.
So in my work with Half Hidden I picked up from a long-term fascination I have with the ways history is stored in materials, in buildings or in the ground. In the earlier work KhoiSan Medicine (2014), an important interest – that was never clearly stated in the work – emerged from my visit to a desert in South Africa, which is unique in that it is a territory that has escaped the ice ages and so there has been very little erosion of the ground. So if you found a stone tool in that desert sand today, it could in principle be anywhere between 10.000 and 200 years old. I was really interested the leveling-out of history that happens in that place, and in that work it somehow functioned as a metaphor for what is happening on the internet too.
I first started thinking about these things in a Greenlandic/Danish context when there was a story in the Danish news about nuclear waste left behind by American military in the Inland Ice which will potentially one day get washed out with the melt water as climate change eats its way through the ice cap. Like a sort of natural excavation where history emerges on its own accord. And when I started looking, it turned out there were quite a lot of histories hidden in the Greenlandic ground. And the mine in Ivittuut is probably one of the most spectacular ones.
Eventually, and kind of to my surprise, I was able to make a full circle from this Danish Colonial mining project in Ivittuut, to the geopolitically and technologically important mineral cryolite which was mined there to aluminium which emerged as a result of cryolite to the technology that I work with everyday in my art practise.
MS: What do you think about the art scene Tromsø? Has this place effected you in any ways ?
AH: At times I have felt like a bit of an alien here in terms of the medium I work with in my practice. There is such a strong fascination for local materials and craft here, and it took me quite a long time to realise how these art forms are embedded in and growing out of this particular place. Before coming here, I think I sort of assumed that my overwhelming obsession with digital art production was a universal phenomenon, and initially I was surprised to see that “the digital” had less traction here in Tromsø.
But I think this particular attention to landscape and materials has been an important antidote to my digital work, and it has somehow crept into my practise, and become quite influential, particularly in my work on the mine in Ivittuut and all the material studies that developed around that work.
