OPENING: OPEN DAY AT TRAFO DECEMBER 3, 2022

FINISSAGE : ARTIST CONVERSATION WITH EIRIK HAVNES DECEMBER 15, 2022

In Liv Kristin Holmberg's doctoral project Art Liturgy - on the Boundaries of Art, she attempts to create new contemporary art based on the old church liturgies. Once the church room was a place for artistic exploration, where much of the contemporary art was produced, but gradually these artistic expressions have become traditions. Holmberg works to fill the liturgical rituals with new contemporary art and creates a series of performance works that take their cue from the traditional liturgies. One of these works is The Liturgy of Paralysis, a performance work and installation that addresses the sudden paralysis artists faced when the pandemic stopped all art production, and the paralysis Holmberg herself felt in addressing the climate issue. Holmberg commissioned music for this art liturgy from Eirik Havnes, who composed Requiem for an Empty Room.

Havnes wrote the organ work Requiem for an Empty Room for a total of 20 different church organs. These are located in church rooms in various villages in Norway that are less used than before due to emigration. Composer Eirik Havnes, organist and performance artist Liv Kristin Holmberg and cinematographer Kristian Davik Larssen have traveled around the Norwegian countryside and collected emptiness and organ sounds that form the foundation for the work. The organs are tuned slightly differently, so that an A from one organ does not correspond to an A from another organ. In recent years, Havnes has immersed himself in microtonal compositions, and uses this collection of different organs to be able to compose microtonally for church organ. The same church rooms were filmed by Larssen, and edited together to form a new and changing church room that follows the musical work in a both mobile and site-specific installation, where the church room is moved into the art room.

In the organ work, Havnes has taken the French organist Louis Vierne's (1870–1937) work “Stèle pour un enfant défunt” (A memorial for the death of a young boy) as his starting point. Vierne was the organist at Notre Dame in Paris for many years and performed this work in his announced closing concert in the church when he died of ill health over the keys as he reached the last note of the work, with his foot resting on the pedal board's low E. This was the last concert in Notre Dame before the church was reserved for liturgical music. Vierne was chosen as the starting point and source of inspiration for the commissioned work as his music and work are central to Holmberg's exploratory practice and performance work.

The installation shown at Trafo was first shown at Rosendal Theatre during the Only Connect festival in Trondheim in 2021, and in collaboration with curator Maria Veie, Paralysens Liturgy was shown as a performance in Nidaros Cathedral, where the audience was able to experience the work alone in the church in the middle of the night, accompanied only by the organ work and Holmberg's performance.