Dollhouse with Front Yard
composition for linguist and drum majorettes with hedge shears

In the dusk a lighted dollhouse is surrounded by a small garden.
The doll house - which takes the form of a video installation - lights up and changes in line with the music.
The music composed live is based on the sounds that occur when working with garden tools.

In the small garden the composer, singer and visual artistist Tine Louise Kortermand performs with garden tools and poetic song. Electro Musician Hans Sydow creates music on his computer based on the sampled sounds of the garden tools. Associate Professor and gender researcher Kirsten Gomard talks about the feminine identity, while Odense Drum Majorettes plays a polyphonic composition for hedge shears.

Bring your own camping chair and thermos and enjoy a half hours of video and music performance - a hybrid between video installation, radio plays, poetic music and art performance.



TEASER

Live performance.
Kings Garden 17 August 2007.
(Flashvideo, 56 Mb)




Live performance
friday 17 August 2007. Hours: 22:00 - 22:30
Kings Garden, Odense/Denmark




Portrait in the magazin
"Women and Society"

by Marianne Asmussen, 2008.


Tine Louise Kortermand mixes hedge shears
with humor in her artistic discourse on gender,
latest in her multimedia project "Dollhouse
with Front Yard - composition for linguist and
drum majorettes with hedge shears" ...

Equality must come from one's inner self, she
says. But although she believes that the
struggle for equal rights for the genders now
is on a psychological level, so ends the battle
for her not in secret place on the therapist's
couch. It is characteristic for her artistic
projects that she rather lead this fight out
into the public. It is not only an individual,
feminine affair but something that concerns
the hole community. In the process of
developing the artpiece she both involves
very different people - and implement the
projects, so a lot gets unexpected experiences.

If you've met Tine Louise Kortermand you will
not be in doubt about what artistic drive is.
With great energy and inner necessityness she
leads her projects into the world. Her next
project will be about the old secret Chinese
female language Nüshü ...

The composition "Dollhouse with Front Yard"
is an identity journey away from the silent
and strange, how?
- I began with philosopher Julia Kristeva's
assertion that women are aliens in their own
culture because it is defined by men.

- I therefore invited the linguist Kirsten
Gomard to cooperate and give lectures on
how our behavior will always be understood
in relation to society's expectations about
gender. I chose her both because of her
research and her personal history.
With her interllect and masculine appearance
she felt different throughout her entire
childhood compared to the standard norms
for how a girl should act and look.
- My idea was to invite different women to
come and perform in the garden. Besides
Gomard I invited Odense Drum Majorettes
because their clothes gives a twist to
women's role being a blend of the masculine
uniforms and something incredibly feminine.
- The work consisted of a video installation
that looked like a dollhouse of sorts. I chose
the dollhouse element, because it is an image
of the traditionally defined feminine and an
image of the game where the girl can create
and build a world of her own ... something new.

- In front of the house, I had planted a small garden, where I worked with various garden
tools. The sounds of the garden tools
generated certain video images, lightening up
the 'doll house', so it was constantly changing
shape during the live performance.

Simultaneously the electro musician
Hans Sydow sampled the sounds, which
occurred while I worked in the garden.
The samples functioned as music
accompanying my singing. I asked Sydow to create a polyphonic composition for hedge
shears that the drum majorettes played as
accompaniment to one of my songs.
Kirsten Gomard's lecture we sampled and
incorporated into the music along with the
sampled sounds of hedge shears, sod and
lawn mover. It all became one 'body' that
interfered with the usual standard norms
and challenged the conventional image of
the woman whom the dollhouse associated to.

- It is this complex, sampled 'body' that
becomes the image of the strangeness within
us, the female alien, I call it. It is the modern
woman who struggles with her inner
constraints; the one she wants to be, but not
yet is because her cultural legacy reaction
pattern drops her in the back.

- It is one of the things that many women
today must overcome in their development
from being wrong in their own self-perception
to be correct. We fight with a strangers
luggage.



Photo: Peter Leth-Larsen
(
Drum majorettes with hedge shears)













ARTCRZZTST - in the process

January 2007 artists and linguists meet for 3 days to find the answer to if a more feminine language excists, which has its own structures.



The idea is to create a multimedia house
– a dollhouse – a video installation, which
responds to sounds in the music.




This meating has created 6 principles for
the 'dollhouse' composition.


The project is shown at Odense
Blomsterfestival and at The Free
Exhibitionbuilding by the artists
Hans Sydow, Tine Louise Kortermand, linguist
Kirsten Gomard and Odense Drum Majorettes.

See the program and photos from the working process under neath.



– ARTCRZZTST –
”Dollhouse with Frontyard”
working process 16 January 2007 - 18 January 2007


16 January 2007 Artists meet and explore the set-up
17 January 2007 (open to the public)
   
9:30 (10 min.) Participants introduce themselves
9:40 (15 min.) Tine Louise Kortermand, artist and organiser
(The ideas "Dollhouse with Frontyard").
9:55 (15 min.) The artists shows eksample of how the installation responds to sounds, language and singing. What they worked on the day before
10:10 (40 min.) PAUSE
10:50 (40 min.) Susanne V. Knudsen, dr.philos., professor
Høgskolen i Vestfold/Vestfold University College, Norway
(Lecture: Kristeva; Semiotic / transfers programa equal and the
symbolic/culturally learned. Gender and language, inspired by
literature research and the more psychoanalytic approach).
11:30 (30 min.) Cindie Aaen Maagaard, Amanuensis, language and communication,
SDU, DK/Odense.
(Lecture: Stream of consciousness and Virginia Woolf)
12:00 (60. min.)
Discussion of the 3 lectures
13:00 (15 min.) PAUSE
13:15 (40 min.) Artists improvise an sample of how the
video installation can respond to sounds, language and singing
14:00 (40 min.) Mikkel Wallentin M.A., Ph.D. Researcher in cognitive neuro-semantics at
Aarhus University Hospital (Lecture: Neural processing of sentences with spatial significance. Gender: Are there differences between women
and men's language formation in the brain?)
  Pia Quist, Adjunkt, ph.d., Nordic Research Institute at Copenhagen University.
(Lecture: the sign on the body. Young people, identity and language).
14.40 (20.min.) PAUSE
15.00 (40 min.) Kirsten Gomard, Associate Professor, Department of History and Area Studies, Department for European Studies of Gender at Aarhus University, DK
(Upload: the performative/sociological angle; womens opportunity
and acces to speak in public spaces. Conditions in the conversation
and their communicative style)
15:40 (50 min.) Discussion of the last 4 up-loads, ideas, perspectives.

18 January 2007
(Photos from the working process with
artists and linguists; test/try-out performance)
 
 
i
 
 
11 May 2007     Theme exhibition “Speak-up”
..    .(Den Fri Udstillingsbygning in Copenhagen)

.........Live performance with the artists
Hans Sydow, Tine Louise Kortermand, .........    linguist Kirsten Gomard and Odense Drum Majorettes playing on hegde shears.

Video installation at the theme exhibition
"Speak up", at the Free Exhibitionbuilding, Copenhagen.

See more HERE >>>


Time & Place:


Live performance and video installation 12 May - 3 June 2007
Theme exhibition "Speak-up", The Free Exbitionbuilding, Copenhagen

Live performance friday, 17 August 2007. Hours: 22:00 - 22:30
Odense Flower Festival, Kings Garden, Odense/Denmark


The artists:

Hans Sydow; composer, electronic musician, organist and teacher in music promotion/
TONESPACE at VKM. Received the three-year working scholarship in 2007 by the Danish
Arts Foundation's Music.
(www.resonance.dk)

Tine Louise Kortermand; composer, singer and visual artist, who combines spoken words, postpunk-
and dreampop with video- and art performance (www.kortermand.dk). Have publised CD in
Japan and USA (www.rumskib.org). Received a working scholarship in 2007 by the Danish Arts Foundation's
Music Committee for Rhythmic Music.


Lingiust:
Kirsten Gomard, Associate Professor, Department of History and Area Studies, Department for European
Studies of Gender at Aarhus University, DK


The project is organised by the artist run projectspace Granat/"Speak-up"

Thanks to fonds and sponsors
Granat; Odense Kommunes Kultursekretariat, Dansk Metal Copy-Dan-Midlerne,
Den Danske Bank – Danske Initiativpuljer, Odense Blomsterfestival,
BAUHAUS garden centre, LO's Kunstnerlegat and Kunstrådets Billedkunstudvalg.