"oh yes, i will practice my canon proudly, a golden image of stark blue skies, of dams and dykes and waterworks, masters and guilds, and how they transformed into dedicated directors, offshore engineers, shiny-looking cars on lease claim our streets with logos of well-designed brands stuck to their windows – one empty baby seat in the back."
the video "beyond the nation state i want to dream" deals with the construct of nation states and national identity in europe, examining the binaries and mechanisms of exclusion at work in the constitution of a ‘we’. consisting entirely of slowly decomposing and recomposing computer-generated images, the video juxtaposes apparently innocuous representations of national identity with sites on which the intersection of nationhood, colonialism and imperial conquest have been made manifest. these sites range from fort elmina, the first european settlement in west africa, to the room in which the 1884 berlin conference took place. such imagery is accompanied by a dream-like monologue in which a narrator attempts in vain to escape from a present in which the historical violence of the nation state is perpetuate in the most mundane aspects of everyday life.
music and sounds for the video are produced and performed by jesse osborne-lanthier and olle holmberg, with a voice-over by therese ladegaard henningsen.