Girls Against God

degree and with New England and I’m back in Oslo, this process continues, flowing from my graduate education into the art I create. My expression slides into the traditional, with a soft appearance and a blurred and beige presence, as if from unknown origins. I work alone – freelance, independently – on my own expression. The only thing I don’t like seeing written about me is that I’m from the South. It feels like a factual error, after five, then ten and, even later, fifteen years of emigration. Calling me a Southern Norwegian reintroduces this set of shadows, a collective and dirty presence that I’ve rinsed from myself. Did I not scrub it from my CV? Is it still there? A few years after earning my masters I go back to the U.S., and at one point in New York, I get a new laptop with an American keyboard, to get rid of æ, ø, and å. When I turn it on for the first time, at a café in Chinatown, I can feel my body tingling, as if I’ve woken up from a plastic surgery that has removed my old features (æ, ø, å) and made my face unrecognisable and impenetrable. Or is it the opposite? Is it the black pigments I feel tingling, and the hatred that has returned?
At first the absence of those keys on the machine feels reassuring, but then it starts to bother me. Have I used my inadequate keyboard to create my own version of the silent h (silent æ, ø, å)? I add keyboard shortcuts to find the letters again. By pressing several buttons at once I can bring up nonexistent signs, as if I’ve concocted a witch’s brew that summons spirits from the underworld. A lonely Å remains, flickering on my screen in a new document that’s never saved, a red line wriggling underneath it, since the writing program doesn’t have a Norwegian spell check. Å, wrong.
Let’s see … I’m sitting here with the pitiful Å, the last letter of the alphabet that no one in the café can read, the invisible letter outside the reach of the keyboard, the letter that fell off the edge of civilisation, the muffled sound, the genetic speech impediment. The keyboard combination, the ingredients of it, summon more than just the letter; they evoke the black from the subconscious, the underground and the underworld. We sit here, the Å and I, at the café in Chinatown, as time speeds up around us, new customers come and go and chug from big American coffee cups filled with the countless choices of coffee that American cafés have to offer. It gets dark and light and dark and light; the café closes and opens and closes and opens. Only the laptop screen is lit with its progressively bigger, blinking Å, coming closer and closer, as if it were falling from the sky and ushering in the apocalypse. The three heralds of the apocalypse: Æ, Ø, Å.
When I get up from my chair and leave the café, I’m in the present, and the premises have moved. The computer is no longer new, and the café is no longer in Chinatown, but in Grønland in Oslo, where the customers drink from small espresso cups and glasses. The laptop screen has gone black, the Å and I have fused completely. I, who spent years creating myself and my artistic identity, I, who attempted to rub out where I came from by emigrating from my own history, have brewed myself together again from the ruins of the keyboard shortcuts.
Now I’m tired, tired of representing myself. I’m so tired of starting every sentence with ‘I …’ Actually, I’m tired of representing anything at all, alone, and of feeling that I’m competing on my own against everyone else. It’s as if all the travelling and all the art meant nothing. Despite everything I’ve brought with me from the South this idea that I’m a sinner, and even though I don’t think about God or Christians anymore, I’ve gone further in that idea than any of them. Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity. I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy. The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty. I walk toward the Munch museum, toward the exhibition opening I’ve been invited to, while I think about how I want to swap some of these negatives in myself for something else, something shared. I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band.
The word BAND is quite similar to the word BOND. Have you thought about that? A band is a bond between people. A band can emerge unexpectedly, when you talk or suddenly say the same things, or mention the same references. You harmonise in conversation, create rhythm. That’s the beginning. We can dive into that beat; the beat is more alive than we are. Our hearts might stop beating in the end, but the pulse of that heartbeat will continue to symbolise time, breath, life, even after we’re gone. It’s that simple. All we can do to feel alive is to dive into the beat, take part in it. Some might call it dancing, but the beat doesn’t necessarily build up to something regular; it’s changeable, and we let go and follow it, it’s there, a shadow cast both by ourselves and by eternity, continuing to spread.
In this bond (in Norwegian the word includes the impossible letter Å, which I can now only write with an illogical character combination on