2021, Oslo, Norway, Collaborative Performance
Produced as part of a collaboration between;
Blythe Thea Williams / Sophie Shiff / Tanvi Sharma / Peter Turnbull / Caspar Danuser /

Thursday, 11th Nov 2021

This whole thing started with Caspar showing up to our designated “lux business meeting” late and holding 3 packets of various raw meats. 

After an hour or so of sitting around listening to music as is common practice in our business, we went out to the small park near my apartment for a smoke break for Caspar and a change of air for me. Sitting on this bench in the almost empty park, Caspar finally got the courage to ask me if I felt like travelling somewhere in Europe because a. our university had strikes the following week and b. he had found some flights for as cheap as £50 return per person. Oh, and of course c. he was feeling especially manic, yet I must have been equally manic as I agreed. 

So we set out with this idea; a one-week long trip, and we put on the first show that launches Lux Perpetua to the world. We ate the meat Caspar had brought, cooked not raw. Then a few emails and searches later we settled on Oslo and that we would fly out the following day. That night we booked flights, trains, and an Airbnb room. We changed appointments for the next week to fit our new schedule. 

During this haze, I’m not sure exactly when in the timeline, Caspar said something along the lines of, “we should do a ritual to open the gallery”. 

Immediately I thought of a close friend of mine, Peter Turnbull, with who I have worked on numerous projects, was in the process of refurbishing and updating a project he was working on. The ritual bot. Ritual bot had started out as a Twitter bot made by Sophie Shiff and Tanvi Sharma, then later they had approached Peter to build the bot into a physical installation. Since then the ritual bot as existed as a thermal printer that generates three rituals printed as a receipt for the viewer to then take and potentially do.

I showed the project to Caspar, and then one cigarette and a phone call to Peter later - we had three American artists for this Oslo show. 

We decided to ask Peter to send us eight ritual receipts and we would try and do some of these rituals and document our process. It was a loose plan but it was a plan.

Friday, 12th Nov 2021 - Saturday, 13th Nov 2021

An anxiety-based train journey and a plane ride later, we were in Oslo. 

On the train, we also selected the three receipts we were going to interpret, one each and one that was collaboratively decided. 

Now as all good projects and businesses start there is a little bit of foot finding and power struggles before you understand each other’s way of working. We had only known each other for five weeks before this trip and so it took us the first few days to discover how we should work. 

Sunday, 14th Nov 2021

On the third evening, after a serious conversation in a restaurant about what we were doing/feeling, we set to work. 

By the time we had walked home we already had a show name. 3 RITUALS BEQUEATHED TO LUX PERPETUA. Now we needed a poster for the show, something mysterious enough to launch with. We had previously decided with Lux Perpetua we should keep to only text posts and only images for the shows or LPs as we call them. Due to poor planning my laptop charger wasn’t functional, so graphic design was limited down to the phone. In a way, I’m glad this was the case because it forced us to be quick and clean with what we were doing. Caspar suggested that if we kept the font as light and airy as possible our Instagram could almost seem like each post was white, adding to the mythology we were building around light. It was perfect. We kept the design simple like this one Agnes Martin poster in a 1970s Art Forum we had seen weeks earlier. 

We tagged the artists and posted it. Then followed as many people as we thought would be supportive as possible. Lux Perpetua was live.

I sat down with a notebook and wrote out each of the nine individual rituals we had selected, then we spitballed possible interpretations of them. Now as the rituals are generated by a bot the language is very interesting and nonsensical, meaning there is a lot of space to interpret and shift the meanings. We chose to do Caspar’s choice of three rituals on Monday, the joint choice on Tuesday and then my choice on Wednesday. We had a rough plan for the Monday and Wednesday rituals but Tuesday seemed harder so we put them to rest for the night.

Monday, 15th Nov 2021

I’m going to shift my writing here a little more to each ritual in the order they appear on the receipts rather than the order in which we completed them.

So, the first ritual was “wake up in your sparkly ditch”. This one gave us a lot of trouble, like a good puzzle to solve. We could have taken “wake up” as literal but Caspar suggested we see it more spiritually, much like our gallery has been built off of spirituality. I started to search churches in the area until I came across Yewongel Brehan Church. Now this church was selected for its architectural forms and not its religion, due to its monolithic nature it just seemed a perfect fit. As well as being somewhere we both wanted to visit for fun. The “sparkly ditch” part was trickier, we decided not to think too hard about it and feel content with the idea that religion is also often about sparkles and facades of sparkles. We had been having a lot of conversations about guilt and at this point, it had become a driving factor in western culture and religion. Perhaps it’s semi cynical for two mostly spiritual people to be thinking like this but here we are. When we got to the church it was closed, we asked a lady who was going to a meeting next door if we could photograph 

Ritual two; “unfortunately feed your enemy”.  Now if I mention raw meat twice in this post, you might begin to think we have an issue here, but that’s a risk I’ll take. The initial plan was to feed each other raw meat, we had been each other’s enemies for the first few days and this felt like a nice send off to the initial difficulties. However, one anxiety-inducing conversation with the butcher later - I can’t legally recommend which meat is safe to eat raw - we had to scrap this. Instead, we chose to search for what we would feed ourselves as our own enemies. Caspar found his choice almost instantly, caviar for its wealthy connotations. I took a little longer but I chose powdered sugar in the hopes of making it into icing, sticky sweetness. We walked out to the woods and selected a rock to sit on while we fed ourselves. Caspar’s images are the only ones that made it into the final selection here as, well, eating white liquid icing is a little too sexual in this specific instance. The orange of the caviar, with the flash photography, also stood out perfectly. 

Finally, for Monday, we had “escape to your grave”. Now Caspar had picked this entire receipt based on this one ritual, he posed that I should do this one personally. For context, not only am I afraid of my mortality but I am also chronically ill in such a way that I am faced with it very often. We had a conversation around my feelings towards undertaking this emotionally and I felt okay to partake in this. I spent some time on google maps looking at the trees surrounding hospitals near us. I had once seen those burial pods underneath trees and really loved the idea of being laid to rest like that or at least under a tree. I wanted to look at surrounding hospitals as in the past few years I have spent a lot of time in and out of them and they are what make me face this fear constantly. After choosing the tree and the hospital, we travelled there to take photographs of me curled up under the tree. As for the “escape” part of the ritual, I had been seeing the whole trip to Norway as an escape from my fears and everyday life, this was just an extension. 

That night we took all the photos off of my camera and onto my newly charged laptop before posting them and trying to brainstorm some of Tuesdays rituals. 

Tuesday, 16th Nov 2021

Tuesday’s rituals were a little harder, two of them were basically impossible due to the nature of how they had been generated but that just made the problem more exciting to solve.

The first ritual was “you are messy again” which we originally took as Caspar running in all white through a muddy field for 6.9 km - I don’t even need to explain the distance. However, he didn’t get “messy” enough and it wasn’t until he threw away the banana skin from the banana he ate for energy and it got stuck in a nearby tree that it all seemed to fall into place.

For the second ritual, we took it a little more metaphorically. “Disastrously, find your orange self and lubricate from the cat” - what a ritual. I was really caught up on the “disastrously” part of this, I decided whatever happened it had to happen by accident, not too many plans. And that it did.

On our walk back from the run, there it was, sat in a field illuminated by perhaps some sun behind the Norwegian cloud cover, a CAT. Well at least by branding. So how did we get to photograph this beautiful piece of machinery, firstly we attempted to see how close we could get to it without trespassing but there was a ditch around the edge of the field and my camera lens wasn’t exactly the lens for long-distance. On our way, we had seen a lady with her dog come out of the road that lead to this farm and commented on how cute her dog was. And just by happenchance, she was returning from walking her dog. Armed with the camera as a perfect excuse we approached her and asked her if it was possible to go and take photos of the machine for an ‘art project’. Her first concern was what would happen to the photos afterwards, which we assured her were for personal use only. With that we had permission, she lead us up the road to her farmhouse and advised us we could stay as long as we needed for photos but she had to go to work. 

After taking a lot of photos, and filming one video which has yet to be released, we left the farm and on our way out realised there were these jerry cans of branded CAT lubricant so of course, that needed a photograph too. 

For the final ritual of that day, I had an urge to do something relational despite my anxiety. The ritual read; “bearing love of elevator button on which a memory and a teeth part notoriously”. Again pretty tricky to decipher. I made an argument that the elevator is a transitionary space that we don’t hold much love for even though it holds us. And Caspar made a case for the teeth being quite mechanical like the mechanisms. I’m not quite sure how it came up but some way or another I mentioned the idea of inhabiting the space and giving out compliments. And that’s kind of what happened.

Unlike the other ritual breakdowns, I’ve written here this one is going to shift more to my personal experience of it.

So we checked the times the train station was most busy and put me inside the elevator with a time for an hour. Caspar told me it would be fine and I just had to make conversations. It was incredibly quiet for a lot of it. And as the elevator was a glass box I was on display for most of it. I stood there anxious about the camera directly above me and hoped nothing bad would happen. There was some graffiti which I translated while I waited ‘all mot me’ - ‘all against me’.

Then the first visiter to the elevator arrived, I was too anxious so I stayed quiet, minus an ‘I hope you have a good day’. After that I got more confident, next came a guy with a bicycle, I asked him if he needed help to get it into the elevator which he agreed to. Then two girls came listening to music out loud they asked if they should turn it off, I said no and we danced on the downwards journey. Next, a man with a pink beanie whose key fob matched that same colour of pink, I complimented his coordination and he offered me a cigarette (I declined but later Caspar said I should have taken it). The same man with the bike returned and was surprised I was still there, I laughed and helped him again. Then a couple with suitcases, it was a tight fit for us and the cases together, they told me they had just returned from living in Spain for a year and were very cold. 

I finally ran into a whole two seconds of trouble when one of the train workers was about to take the elevator and saw me and immediately changed his mind on entering the elevator - I felt sure I was busted but nothing came of it. 

My last formal visitors were an older couple, who asked me if it was for a school project and how long I had been it the elevator. I told them it must be nearing an hour and yes I was on a school trip. Then as they left Caspar joined me in the elevator for the last ride. 

And that was it my hour was up. We uploaded the photos and went onto day three. 

Wednesday, 17th Nov 2021

Now the second ritual of Wednesday was technically done on Tuesday as we needed to record it before we took the train to Sandefjord. So I shall start with that.

“If only you could read hourly, you might perform something for the breakfast”. A beautiful prompt, we originally took the reading hourly very literally and were trying to work out how to read one sentence an hour for 24 hours, but I valued my sleep too much. So then Caspar realised, we are in Norway. Most of the texts available to us here are not in our languages. So off to the library we went. If you remember that kids game of selecting a random book off the shelf and reading one sentence off it as a fortune, this is what we did in the library. Caspar filmed himself picking a book, opening it and reading from it. We uploaded the video with the caption [unknown Norwegian]. 

As for actual Wednesday, Caspar had set this whole day plan up for me, we were to take the train to Sandefjord and visit a doctor for my chronic illness, then also film the last ritual which I had picked. On the train, we watched a lecture on attention and art which was mandatory for our class the next day. The lecturer was dry but very good, he made the attention very much about film and life rather than art. It was a good setting for the day.

When we arrived we walked to the park because for the first time on this trip there was sun, Caspar had to even buy sunglasses. I felt restored. The next part of this story is more private so I won’t go into such heavy detail, but the doctor’s appointment was the first time I as somebody with intense chronic pain was able to have some of that relieved by treatment. It left giddy happiness yet mourning on the fact I had to even experience this pain in the first place. 

For the final ritual, we sat on a pier while the sunset and recorded our conversation around the ritual topic “do you remember the first time you embraced your love”. This was a hard conversation for both of us so we ended up editing it down to the key moments and phrases to encapsulate what we wanted to say. The audio was then paired with a recording of the water and the sky. 

We took the train back and the show was concluded. 

Thursday, 18th Nov 2021 - Friday, 19th Nov 2021

Although the show was over we had two more days in Norway. 

Thursday morning and afternoon ended up being quite useless, we both slept in and had zoom class at different times. But for the evening we planned to go to Oslo National Academy of the Arts for their open studios and gallery shows. Caspar knew a friend studying there; Mark Walker and Mark had agreed to be a guide to the open house. Mark gave us a tour of various performances and on-campus gallery shows, Caspar and I collected names and photographs of art for networking. Mark then kindly showed us his studio and what he was working on, although he didn’t have an open studio himself. He showed us this cabinet he had built to dry out ginger and vegetables to then photograph. The cabinet itself was easily as much of a work of art as the velvety dark room tests he showed us. 

After seeing Mark’s studio, Caspar was insistent on finding an artist whose work he liked. The challenge was Mark didn’t know this artist or where to find him. So we set off on a treasure hunt of the school, Mark asking who he knew for this artist. Finally, we were directed to the BA studios and told to look for the studio covered in black tarp. Which shockingly wasn’t tricky as there was a large gathering within this particular studio. Being too anxious to push our way in Mark and I stood outside while one of the girls gave Caspar the push he needed to ask for this artist. Within seconds of being dragged in Caspar was already talking to Per Antonsen. Mark and I took this as a confidence boost and sat nearer the edge of the studio and talked to the girl who had pointed Caspar inside. While they were talking, I made my way over to Caspar and was also introduced to Per and co. 

Of all of the artists, Caspar could have selected he managed to pick the one guy who was also part of a group of four pushing Oslo’s music and party scene at the time, as well as having a record label. The luck we were having was godly. We spent the evening talking business and beyond. The boys had a friend at Goldsmiths and were planning to visit London in March, we kept the date as a ‘we must do something’. 

Our final day was a day of rest. We packed up and went to the one place every art world person knows has lockers and a cloakroom; an art museum. The Astrup Fearney was showing a Sissel Tolaas show on top of their usual collection. The Tolaas show gave the viewer a bottle of liquid that smelt like money as a keepsake, which sung good fortunes to our noses. By now you should know we are quite superstitious people. We rushed around the show and the collection all before closing took our piece of Torres candy, took photos with the Koons, took a snapshot of a label for our class assignment. 

Yet we still had a few hours to kill before our flight. After taking some photos around the harbour in the last of the light, I pointed to the glowing ferris wheel in the distance ‘I want to go on that’. And so we walked in that direction until we found the Christmas market. I then told Caspar of my fear of heights, he laughed and dragged me onto it anyway. We did two rotations of the wheel, and I felt like I was going to pass out the entire time from its creaks and wobbles. Caspar took photos of me with flash and I look like a tortured soul in them.

After the wheel, we sat for a second for me to catch my breath and heart, and to not have a full-blown panic, then set on our last two activities of the trip. The first was to manically ‘skate’ around the bladeless ice rink that was at the market. And then we walked through this long tunnel of light that was definitely an Instagram trap that we 100% fell for.  

And with that, it was back to the airport and back home.