HANNE NIELSEN & BIRGIT JOHNSEN _ VIDEORAUM

At the Fence .Extract from the video installation.

At the Fence. 2019

Duration 18:19 min.

By the Fence. Viborg Kunsthal. 2019.

The video installation At the Fence, is taking it starting point at the recently erected wild boar fence along the Danish-German border. The video constructs and thematises various imaginary, fictive spaces around it. One fictive space is the romantic notion of the forest and wild landscape fable animals/masked figures. Another fictive space is the fiction itself that the fence will in fact be able to keep out ‘desirable’ visitors and ‘others’.

But the most important fictive space that At the Fence thematises, emphasises and dwells on is that referred to by music. First the wild boar fence is transformed into an acoustic border where unending row of loudspeakers blast their individual propaganda and military music from all over the world and turn the fence info a power struggle between regimes, despots and cultures – between those on one side of the fence and those on the other. But the endless rows of loudspeakers and endless propaganda music are interrupted by two hooded persons/activists presenting a counter response in the shape of small handmade mobile phone amplifiers that they place on the fence bordering on ‘the others’ trying to demand a completely different type of persuasive, collective voice and sound : namely one that crosses borders in a solidary mobilisation of emotions and protest.