Lisa Jeannin & Rolf Schuurmans: GGG & G

Marble Cake Auntyyochana

Like a marble cake the stories blended by the fabulists Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Shuurmans are layered like parallel worlds all merged into one yummie loaf. There are few things as mesmerizing as the conveying of parallel worlds simultaneously meandering towards unknown goals. In Goddess, Gorillas, Goblins and Gangsters (GGG & G) we are presented with snippets from at least three such worlds, some of them meet in wondrous ways, while others are left isolated. In Hollywood narratives are often stirred together in a plot where every seemingly disparate part finally come together in a unified destiny. In front of the three screens provided to watch the many stories within GGG & G we are liberated from such nonsense to meet another type of nonsense. This nonsense is also marked by precision, but superseded by the joy of haphazardness instead of religious zeal.

The need for dogma. The need for precision. If I don’t get exactness then I want nonsense. And exactness even in nonsense. Nonsense as dogma.

Sven Lindquist*

Play dough in Swedish is referred to as ”trolldeg”. This translates as troll dough. Both feature in the animated fables produced by this couple. With this dough they’ve formed figures which frame by frame move forward step by step in unison with other plastic characters. The Goddess, Gorillas, Goblins and Gangsters that the video installation is titled never meet each other or anyone else for that matter. It is the viewer who is left to witness their potential encounters as they slip by. The characters are forever separated but still unified by the loop… and maybe the plastic that they are all made from.

Spider. Grey, fluffy and gorgeously cute, this member of the Arachnida family is in its chamber producing its own psychedelic animation with a set of brushes and a slip of film. Spider then turns the lights off and plays the film. Once the film has been played the spider tucks itself into the sleeping bag and snores as sweet as can be. Meanwhile a pack of cards beside the sleeping bag turns into turmoil and are caught on camera flying off as a wind rushes through the room. As they fly away with them follows the zoom and we, the viewers, are now transported into another world. An urban landscape is shown with skyscrapers and modern features such as a giant video screen displaying a green goddess.

Time is a funny thing. Up until I was maybe 5 years old I had very little comprehension of time. I had been informed about women giving birth but ignorant of any other details I formed my own version, which did not heed to the related issue of size. It was thus quite imaginable for me that a 3 year old could give birth to a 72 year old. In a similar way Jeannin and Shuurmans pay little respect to time and space, in fact they knit their own logic together, smitten with a refusal to omit to any other convention than their own. It is this luscious logic in combination with their capacity to PLAY with dough and celluloid that makes their worlds stir mine.

Stella d’Ailly

NOTES *Quote translated from Swedish to English by Stella d’Ailly from the book A married mans diary (En gift man dagbok) published in 1982 by Bonniers. For the recipe of the above pictured tri-colored marble cake, visit Aunti Yochana’s baking blog at: http://auntyyochana.blogspot.com/2007/04/marble-cake.html The picture of the cliff comes from the Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado National Park.

GORILLA GODDESS GANGSTER AND THE GOBLINS A video myth by Lisa Jeannin and Rolf Schuurmans

G G G & G is a story with multiple space and time facets, in which the fragments are so charged and communicative that the interlaced entity paradoxically becomes natural and self-evident. G G G & G is about mental spaces, models of projection for questions with regard to reality’s chaos and the complicated obviousness of life. From time to time a hall of mirrors is described in which identity is questioned and the monument of reality collapses. Here an inquisitive gorilla can discover herself in thousands versions with the aid of her filming camera eye; or it is also possible that a frustrated and lonely gangster shoots the mirrors into pieces, maybe carefully in order to keep his enigmatic nature intact. But soon the looping restores this hall of mirrors. G G G & G is about the coming into existence from magical rituals performed by small colourful trolls, about the loneliness of the gangster in a world revealing its built-in fiction, about the green goddess’s lust for creation and destruction in front of a sterile civilization, about positive identity dissolutions as a strategy to welcome and form a larger reality, about the return to nature and the green and about the spider’s fantasy and the public’s fantasy and fantasy as a subversive force aimed against order and reason who threaten humour and human dignity with death.

Leif Holmstrand

Lisa Jeannin & Rolf Schuurmans: GGG & G