I’m not here, I’m everywhere…

A sphere and a hundred dots. A balloon hovering over the dam at Nærsnes. Several hundred meters away in a part of the woods dominated by spruce, the trunks of hundred trees are painted with bands of white color, all at the same level, making a carefully measured horizontal line through the slanting landscape, at the exact height of the balloon.

Is this an invitation for us to connect the dots, to fill in the blanks? On one level, we are invited to make an imaginary incision, following a perfectly straight line going through the woods, to the dam, making something which is fundamentally out of place (spheres and straight lines belong to a human world of abstraction and imagination; in nature they are nowhere to be found)? Yet, this simple form opens up something much more complex.

A hundred years ago Paul Klee wanted to take a line for a walk. Starting from an elementary straight line on paper, he showed his students at Bauhaus how to transform it into artfully wavy patterns and three-dimensional effects. Here, Klee’s invitation is made literal: we draw in space through walking, while also drawing space. An imaginary geometrical line interrupts and is interrupted by the landscape, by trees, stones, water, air, and our movements, making two different worlds alternatively merge and collide.

Halvor K. Haugen