The Mill is an Instrument

We’d like to invite you to Instrument, a month long exhibition this July in a large timber structure in the South of Sweden.

The Mill is the charismatic actor that overshadows all that plays inside. A large timber-framed warehouse, in the 1930’s it became an electric seed mill that was still operating in 2000. Its vast halls and remaining silos occasionally spill grain and rat droppings onto the floor, still shedding its former glory.

The building was a gigantic instrument, thick with dust from decades of grinding seeds, gravity-fed, its location an artery to the surrounding countryside.

We invite you to observe the new artist created instruments that respond to this setting, whether as agency, as a dupe, as implement, as a recording, measuring or controlling device, as a music machine or even a legal tool!

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“For the elderly, often the nearby and recent become vague and only the faraway in time and space is vivid. For children, it’s the distance that holds little interest. Gary Paul Nabhan writes about taking his children to the Grand Canyon, where he realized “how much time adults spend scanning the landscape for picturesque panoramas and scenic overlooks. While the kids were on their hands and knees, engaged with what was immediately before them, we adults traveled by abstraction.” He adds that whenever they approached a promontory, his son and daughter would “abruptly release their hands from mine, to scour the ground for bones, pine cones, sparkly sandstone, feathers, or wildflowers.” There is no distance in childhood: for a baby, a mother in the other room is gone forever, for a child the time until a birthday is endless. Whatever is absent is impossible, irretrievable, unreachable. Their mental landscape is like that of medieval paintings: a foreground full of vivid things and then a wall. The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.”
the blue of distance