NAUSEA

NAUSEA is a poetic-scientific performance, a live documentary about the sea visualized by means of shadows and projections. The soundtrack is played from a reel-to-reel recorder and several analogue projectors cast extra layers on the screen.
The used lamplights throw dancing shadows on the roof and walls, making the whole space move. As an episode of an outdated documentary, an indifferent-sounding narrator guides the audience from the vibrant and glittering surface to the dark and gloomy bottom of the sea, underway informing them about the most interesting marine lifestyles. Nausea was made during an artist-in-residence at the former fishing house Kråkeslottet in northern Norway.

Nausea is part of a series of semi-documentaries, reminiscent of pre-cinematic performances. Analogue techniques are combined to form a three-dimensional illusion. Shadow theatre is taken to other dimensions and cinema is turned into a different experience with these rich and multi-layered shows. The shows are played in a delicate and complex construction consisting of fragile mechanisms, strings, wheels, fishing hooks, bits of card board, etc… The manipulators move carefully around in this fragile universe so as not to break something. All along the performance the audience can undergo the mechanics surrounding the screen, which are made completely visible. The whole show is managed from an on-stage, low-tech control table; strings are pulled, lamps are turned on and off and several objects are animated live. The careful handling of objects and mechanics becomes a show in itself. Spectators can follow the movements of this machine-construction in the same way as one can track film in a Super-8 projector.