Installation and performance by Synsmaskinen & Volve Vokal, KMD Artistic Research Forum 2018. A collaboration made in the artistic research project Synsmaskinen. Participants: Benedicte Clementsen, Ole Christian Ellestad, Kjersti Sundland, Frans Jacobi and Volve Vokal.
La Borde- Grenseløse Navn is an installation and performance based on a road trip made in the summer 2018 by the group to the mythical psychiatric Clinique La Borde located in Loir-et-Chair, France. The hospital was the home of philosopher Felix Guattari, who were co-director from 1950ties until 1992. The therapy practiced at La Borde rejected conventional approaches of separating staff and patients, and they were living together, sharing the responsibilities of running the institution. Focus on expressions through art, music and theater was an important therapeutic tool at La Borde. La Borde was the home of philosopher Felix Guattari when writing the seminal works Anti-Oedipus, What is Philosophy? and Thousand Plateaus together with Gilles Deleuze. The psychiatric hospital is still running, and the performance was based on a road trip to France with the group following the texts of Deleuze and Guattari in 2017.
The video projected on the large wall of the upper aula at KMD consists of a video shot on location at La Borde. The recorded video was sampled with experts from the documentary Every Little Thing by Nicolas Philibert, sound excerpts from Ronal D Laing`s lecture on transpersonal psychology, and the movie Solaris by Andrey Tarkovsky. The video was with a voiceover recollecting the visit to La Borde by the artists, forming the basis of a choreographed choir performance.The voice rehearsals by residents at La Borde in the documentary by Philibert was echoed in the movement and voices of the choir setting of their performance.
