This series by VNIVRS examines the parallel visual elements that emerge across creative practices that engage with this relational experience. Our first instalment, ‘The Green Tint’ looks at the coinciding elements of the colour green which, besides symbolising nature, fertility and life, also suggests harmony, balance and learning. It embodies our desire to expand and increase, while it can also be seen as a safe and restful colour. In the following images green is used as a raw element material for lighting, set and tone.

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

A person on stage has a dual experience: as witness to immediacy of her own presence, and also as a spectacle consumed by the audience. This parallel positioning and distance is manipulated even further by the use of glass, whereby the image of a subject might be fragmented, divided or isolated as a figure on stage.

‘Geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, [producing] a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion.’

 – Dan Graham

‘Within theatrical jargon a syntagm fourth wall stands for the imaginary, fictive partition between the actor and the audience […] Spy-glass mirror acting as the front wall of the cube, separates the encapsulated stage from the voyeurist audience, which the actors now cannot see, facing instead their own multiplied image.’

– Description of ‘Inferno / Divine Comedy’ directed by Tomaz Pandur and written by Dante Alighieri, at the National Theatre Maria Guerrero, Madrid 2005.

‘[…] the front gauze flew up and the lights brightened to reveal an impressive, appropriately rather gloomy set, with huge windows set at an angle and letting us understand that the “cart” had, in fact, been a centrally placed four-poster bed […]’

– ‘The Turn of the Screw’ directed by Benjamin Britten, 2010, review by Peter Lathan for The British Theatre Guide.

‘He started to depict specific details in the backgrounds of these works and created a nuanced interaction between subject and setting. Figures are boxed into cage-like structures, delineated ‘space-frames’ and hexagonal ground planes, confining them within a tense psychological zone. In 1952 he described this as ‘opening up areas of feeling rather than merely an illustration of an object’.’

– Text from the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009

‘Man is an abyss – you feel giddy when you look into it.’

– ‘Wozzeck’ by Alban Berg

‘The protagonists are observed,’ as the composer Luca Francesconi explained, as if they were ‘… some bugs in a terrarium.’

‘I was looking at it on the monitor, watching everyone trying not to look at themselves. It was a great thing to do in the fashion industry—turn it back on them!’

– Alexander McQueen¹ 

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

1. http://www.style.com/stylefile/2010/02/mcqueen-the-showman/ ↩

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

‘The external spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold’¹ wrote the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. To take notice of our perceptions, let them rush in, blow over us, is a post-modern ritual, replacing ancient and religious modes of delivery: cleansing and healing. In consuming a spectacle, our senses are engaged. In this experience, we project our image, suspending it in space, meditating on our own void. In search of answers, we turn to spectacles that captivate our senses: art, theatre, fashion and cinema.

‘Like the sea, it reveals the depths of being within us.’

– Philippe Diolé²

‘When the waters rise, humanity will go back to the place from whence it came. “but then again, I’m no Nostradamus…”’

– Alexander McQueen³

‘Every time I view the sea, I feel a calming sense of security, as if visiting my ancestral home; I embark on a voyage of seeing.’

– Hiroshi Sugimoto⁴ 

‘Why is the spectacle of the sea so infinitely and eternally agreeable? Because the sea presents at once the idea of immensity and movement.’

– Charles Baudelaire⁵

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

1. G Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994, p. 182. ↩

2. P Diolé, The Most Beautiful Desert of All, Jonathan Cape, London, 1959, p. 14 ↩

3. http://www.alexandermcqueen.com/experience/en/alexandermcqueen/archive/?years=2010#id_article=260 ↩

4. http://www.sugimotohiroshi.com/seascape.html ↩

5. C Baudelaire, Intimate Journals, Dover Publications, New York, 2006, p. 90 ↩

While the desert is often a source of inspiration for film and art, it delivers other creators back to a place in their memory too, fuelling a desire to create a sensory experience from this context. Sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte grew up in this setting, stating in an interview with Maurizio Cattelan that, ‘upon seeing our collection completed we began to see its connection to the arid desert landscapes that we had grown up with… We are attracted to imperfection and to the beauty of chaos.’² Or in Philippe Diolé’s words, ‘a vast pandemonium frozen into stillness.’³

‘Lucid Stead is about tapping into the quiet and the pace of change of the desert. When you slow down and align yourself with the desert, the project begins to unfold before you. It reveals that it is about light and shadow, reflected light, projected light, and change.’

Phillip K Smith III⁴

1. P Diolé, The Most Beautiful Desert of All, London, Jonathan Cape, 1959, p. 207. ↩

2. Flash Art, ‘A Material World’, Issure 277, March-April 2011, http://www.flashartonline.com/interno.php?pagina=articolo_det&id_art=698&det=ok&title=RODARTE ↩

3. Interview with P Diolé, The Spectator, 23 April 1959, p.29. ↩

4. http://royaleprojects.com/lucid-stead#/i/1 ↩

Fog is a milky veil that suggests transformation, magic and spectacle. Transcending into another mode of being is indeed an act of magic, to overcome our bodily qualities if only for an instant. Today, as much as in Ancient times, there is a need to experience a sense of salvage and so these acts continue to form part of our contemporary rituals and spectacles.

‘I love the idea of working with almost nothing — light, air, smoke. Like a cheap magic act.’

Rick Owens

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1853.

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

Storm insists on change as an element of movement, its force and eternal mission derives destruction from flow. When it crosses us, its urge of movement requires an abandonment of our old thoughts and actions. We move where the wind blows us. In this fight for our own existence, we adopt the characteristics and patterns of movement of such forces of nature. Subjects move with the order of nature, and it will forever hold this power over us.

‘It is the principle of “correspondences” to receive the immensity of the world, which they transform into intensity of our intimate being’

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1994. 

‘Art imitates nature, and it is the part of the same discipline to know the form and the matter up to a point.’

R P Hardie and R K Gaye from Physica in The Works of Aristotle, 1930.

 ‘Oh, and there’s Night, there’s Night, when wind full of cosmic space

Fling that emptiness out of your arms

into the space we breathe – maybe that the birds

will feel the extended air in a more fervent flight’ 

Rainer Maria Rilke, the first elegy in Duino Elegies, 1930.

Anna Ellinor Sundström is a photographer, filmmaker and founder of VNIVRS.

The physical presence of explosions are at once catastrophic and annihilating, yet utterly fascinating. Perhaps it is exactly these qualities and beliefs, those of the apocalypse and the end of the world that deliver us equal fear, equal calm. In striving to create something new, we must not be afraid to obliterate the past.

‘Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants. Anti-traditional energy becomes a voracious vortex. To this extent, the modern is myth turned against itself; the timelessness of myth becomes the catastrophic instant that destroys temporal continuity.’

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 2004.

‘If you could record an explosion with a high-speed camera that takes one thousand images per second, for example, you’d see a thousand pictures. If you hung them up you’d see a thousand different sculptural forms. Crazy! The form changes constantly. So much is happening. So much happens in a thousandth of a second. Yet the explosion is the opposite: there’s a bang, and then it’s done.’

Roman Signer, interviewed by Armin Senser for BOMB Magazine, autumn 2008