Full HD 16:9, Colour, Sound
2017 - 18
08 min
With Yen Proesmans
Shot in Pedrógão Grande, Santo Amaro,
Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa,
The work includes found footage.
During the summer 2017 parts of Portugal where besieged by some of the worst forest fires seen in recent times in Europe. The fire spread over 45.000 hectare and took 66 human lives. Resulting in huge areas becoming empty and uninhabitable. Forest fires have historically been a threat in the area, but the phenomena seems to be only increasing.
The eucalyptus tree, introduced to the Portuguese flora at the end of the 18th century, today covers around 7 precent of the country’s area, and is a tree known for its highly flammable qualities. In some cases, it can explode when exposed to extreme heat, fragments can travel up to a 100 meters, resulting in a fire spreading rapidly and aggressively.
In October 2017 the artist Thyra Dragseth set out with a camera, into the forest north of Lisbon, with her friend and colleague Yen Proesmans. This excursion, intertwined with other footage resulted in the work In Search of Dead(ly) Fires. A four channel video installation where the ambiguous photographic gaze has become the focal point of the work itself.
In the attempt to depict the landscape and the fateful events that have taken place, the photographer looses her innocence. The artists gaze is both compassionate and opportunistic. Whilst showing the spectator the harsh reality, the erotic and aesthetic in the experience is ultimately emphasised. The same landscapes that portray this horrific disaster, are manipulated to create something beautiful.
The work investigates violence in its different manifestations. The artist visually explores our almost perverse fascination to violence, circling the bruised body like a vulture.
Though traumas, present in the nature, and present to the people wandering these landscapes are captured, it reaches a point were it is impossible to separate the cameras sober footage from the fascination of the catastrophe belonging to the eye looking through the lens.
Text by Sofie Amalie Andersen.
Conflict Consumption
Full HD 16:9, Colour, Sound
20 min
2019
Shot in Ila Pensionate, Oslo
and in Ramallah, Hebron, and Jerusalem in Palestine and Israel
Plaster and clay casts
Conflict Consumption tells the story of a journey conducted for both artistically reasons, as well as being a visual metaphor of the artists need for understanding, in order to create. This desperate need to understand someone or something becomes an important note in the conversations. Instead of seing and hearing the interviews from the West Bank, we see the artist in conversation with her colleague Iris Bengtsson.
Conflict Consumption discusses the ethics around being a visual artist in situations like this, whilst at the same time clinging on to the starting point of the project namely Necropolitics.
Necropolitics, from Achille Mbembe (b.1957) is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. Necropolitics is a theory of the walking dead, namely a way of analysing how "contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death" forces some bodies to remain in different states of being located between life and death. Mbembe uses the examples of slavery, apartheid, the colonisation of Palestine and the figure of the suicide bomber to show how different forms of necropower over the body (statist, racialised, a state of exception, urgency, martyrdom) reduce people to precarious conditions of life.
Installation view from Kunstakademiets Bachelor graduates exhibition, 2019, Ila Pensionate, Oslo. Avlat
Full HD 16:9, Colour, Sound
2016
11 minutes
With Jesper Lind and Pia Ribu
By Marthe Thu and Thyra Dragseth
Avlat is a film that examines gender dominance, nature and nurture, and power in and between relationships. The film is a monologue based psychological drama depicting a masochistic male role, where a woman considers and listens to his immersion into his own psyche. The dominance of gender and typical gender roles gives the work a strong feministic connotation.
The film is inspired by David Foster Wallace`s novel "Brief Interviews with hideous men" published in 1999 by Little Brown and Company.
For access to full video contact thyradrag[at]gmail.com
The Cut Slaps
Video Installation
2019
08:55 min
Excerpt, 01 min.
The work explores an attempt of revisiting traumatic memories through violence. To connect to a personal emotional space and secondly to observe this process.
Installation view, Pointed Coinsciousness QB Gallery, Oslo, 2019. Foto: Istvan Virag.
Jeg husker, men betyr det at det er sant? /
I remember but does that mean its true?
Film
10.22 min
2015
Autobiographical film about family relationships. The movie explores the individuality of memory, and the selectivity of memories.
For access to full video contact thyradrag [at] gmail.com