In the video work that forms part of Rosie Heinrich’s multidisciplinary
project, we always need heroes¶ (2020), a middle-aged Icelandic woman narrates
the story of the nation’s economic crash in 2008. Listening to her undulating fairy-tale-like
voice, we become children again, wanting to be carried away to a fantasyland. But
the narrator’s exaggerated facial gestures and slow de-constructive
pronunciation of certain words alert us to the slippery nature of narrative. As
the screen cuts to sedimented reams of white paper and geological abstractions
of solidified black lava, we hear the voices of other unseen protagonists.
These bankers, historians, folklorists, scientists and fishermen recount in
snippets the largest systemic banking crash experienced by any country in
economic history. But the core of their narrative revolves around the emotional
journey of a nation blindly led by national myths and promises that were never grounded
in reality. We are invited to sit in the psychological aftermath of the crash,
sifting through the emotional and political debris together – not as strangers,
but as fellow human beings navigating the fragility of our own narratives.
Although we never see these protagonists, their
recollections are subtitled with a specially devised notation of excessive body
movements, stutters and exhalations that subtly conveys the existential impact
of the crash. The population’s euphoric and sublime experience of identifying
with politicians’ and businessmen’s spun tales invoking the pride of Iceland’s
“Golden Age” transforms in the space of 24 hours into bankruptcy and a hole at
the centre of Iceland’s national narrative. That void in the population’s sense
of reality is echoed in subtitles of recurring empty circles and blank spots. The
lack of any future narrative is marked emphatically by shots of black and white
spheres, floating, planet-like on Iceland’s geological landscape, as if the
gaps and holes in these narratives of reality have been made to physically
manifest. In this abstracted yet material context, we are invited to take stock
of our reflexes as listeners complicit in the construction of the real. As the black
spheres bob gently on the volcanic rockscape, white circles appear on the
screen, forming outlines that seem to narrowly miss the objects they propose to
frame. It’s as if reality is always off-centre of our perceptions and here we
catch ourselves in the act of mental intervention.
Despite the specificity of its socio-political context,
the we always need heroes¶ project echoes a number of other works by Heinrich
that poise us in a place in which we must contemplate the borders between
reality and delusion. In her film It’s possibly the only way that I can walk
through myself, alternating fragmented observations by two individuals recounting
their manic, depressive and psychotic daily life experiences are juxtaposed against
photographic images these protagonists have made of their home interiors.
Innocuous objects appear overwhelming in some, while others lend the sky
overhead a religious significance. The film plays subtly with our tendency to identify
with stories; challenging us as listeners as normality veers into mental
instability. Through her testing of the phenomenon of belief, a similar effect
is achieved in It was big enough to get me completely inside, a 10” vinyl with an accompanying 16-page booklet that
forms an assemblage of interchanging voices telling of esoteric and shamanic
rituals and training exercises in pursuit of transcendence. In both
works, we are invited to walk together to the other side of reality; sensing
that the boundary between reality and delusion is subjective and open to
re-imagination. Even when things are strictly logical, the delusional is always
latent, a possibility evoked by Rational Inattention, a choral work from the we always need heroes¶ project that synthesises an economic behavioural model with
a beloved Icelandic lullaby.
While Heinrich’s interests in listening and the
self-narration of stories remain constants in her practice, her recent work
points to a more precise dis-assembly of language itself. Her we always need heroes¶ book captures the narrative non-sequiturs of the video work through the graphic presence of the subtitled psychophysical
notations and the unexpected use of perforations throughout the text. The disorientation
of habitual modes of reading and listening is a central aim of her current sound,
music and performance works-in-progress. In a yet-unfinished video work, entitled
Eat My Words, we watch a woman articulate words in what appears to be
unfamiliar language. Slowly their meaning becomes intelligible through a series
of phonetic turns that prompt us to recognise both the strangeness of
comprehension and our agency as co-authors of meaning. Rather than producing
speech effortlessly through the mouth, the protagonist masticates on words, hinting
at the ways that speech utilises the digestive pipe as much as the windpipe.
Language returns to the stomach, operating beyond the boundaries of the
rational mind.