Mourning Diary
Galleri Fisk, Bergen, Norway 20183-hour recording of the breath in-between words, speaker elements, negative & positive cables
hand bound book, punctuation
The artist records themselves reading Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes aloud, then removes all spoken words, leaving only the breath that occurs between them. What remains is a continuous sequence of inhalations and exhalations, gaps that once held language, now emptied of it.
The voice becomes fragmented, reduced to its most basic function: the movement of air through the body. Breath emerges as both support for speech and something that exceeds it, a rhythm that continues when words fall away. It carries a sense of effort, interruption, persistence, at times approaching a gasp, at other times barely audible.
Alongside this, the text is rewritten without its words. The book remains, but only as punctuation, a structure of pauses, breaks and intervals. Language is reduced to its skeletal form, a series of marks that once organised meaning now sit without content. Sound and text begin to mirror one another, breath punctuates the absence of speech, while punctuation marks the absence of words. Both suggest a framework that holds something that is no longer there.
The work moves through this space between language and its collapse, attending to what remains when expression becomes insufficient. It lingers in the threshold between articulation and silence, where grief may register not in what is said, but in what cannot be spoken.
