Over the past decade, Marthe Ramm Fortun has carved out a distinctive position for herself in the Norwegian art field. Her performances, which often take place in public spaces, can be likened to slow-motion parkour accompanied by poetic text performances, the latter often based on current or historical events. Ramm Fortun enters the rigid frameworks of cultural institutions as a destabilising guest, a questioning and energetic agent. For example, she may enter into a direct dialogue with the canon and the venerable masters of Norwegian art history, such as Christian Krogh or Gustav Vigeland. Or she may enter quiet museum halls filled with stuffed animals as a very obviously alive and insistingly loud presence.
Ramm Fortun is currently working on a performance series for a two-part exhibition, a collaboration between CRAC Alsace and CREDAC in Paris. Here she takes her starting point in the queer literary salon run by the feminist writer Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris from 1908 to 1972 – and in two boxes of hair that she found among the papers Clifford Barney donated to the Doucet special library at the Sorbonne. On 22 March, the stage will also be set for the sixth of ten planned performances that Ramm Fortun will present at the University Museum in Bergen over the course of as many years (the project was initiated by KORO (Public Art Norway) and curated by Marit Paasche, and also includes contributions from fellow artist Mattias Härenstam).
For those who have a relationship with the museum, which opened in 1865 and is colloquially called the Natural History Museum, it is a place often associated with childlike wonder –although it is filled to the brim with dead animals and obsolete taxonomies. When Ramm Fortun and I finally found an occasion to meet after having eluded each other for some time, we did so right after her fifth performance at the museum last winter. This conversation took place in another location brimming with knowledge: the National Library of Norway’s canteen, a room whose acoustics made the conversation something reminiscent of a spiritualist séance. Did I hear what I heard?
Did you manage to carry out the performance at the University Museum in Bergen?
Yes, I got it done. But I was ill, and became very ill afterwards. These are the kind of trade-offs I always make. It has nothing to do with masochism at all. It’s more about constantly determining one’s limit. Not being reckless, but also finding out what is in fact possible.
Do you tend to fall ill when you perform?
Not because of the performances. They do not determine whether I am healthy or ill. It’s about getting to do what I want to do. But I am not interested in operating in a landscape that revolves around my exposure, or danger in itself, or in prompting the audience to feel sympathy for some kind of suffering; that is not what I am aiming for. That is why it is a problem for me if I am not in good health. It hurts my performance. If anything, I grow healthy and strong from soldiering through with those performances. Something about it is reminiscent of training for an athletic feat. These are things you cannot practice directly. But I need to be strong to endure it without perishing.
Good! The performance you did at the University Museum is part of KORO’s Minervas stemme (Minerva’s voice), a project curated by Marit Paasche. Can you tell us something about the project?
I’m over halfway through Vi skal ikke lage lærebøker [We shall not write textbooks]. I have never before had the opportunity to realise a project over so many years. It has only been possible because curator Marit Paasche made it a condition for KORO that the project should not be put out as an open call, but consist of works by myself and Mattias Härenstam, and that we should put forward our own proposals on what we wanted to do in the museum. Then I asked to have a performance series that spanned a time frame of ten years.
That’s quite a commitment. What is the advantage of working on the same project for a decade?
I wanted to follow the overall developments within museum science. The field tends to see certain developments over the course of ten to fifteen years, and I wanted to capture any changes. For example, at one point it was proposed that a sculpture made of plastic should be made in the museum to illustrate ocean pollution. At the time, the general belief was that the problem of plastic littering the oceans would be solved after ten years. As we know, that didn’t happen. I am interested in being able to notice and capture changes in our outlooks as they are reflected in the museum.
Museums are not as quick on the uptake as other kinds of exhibition venues, or artists for that matter.
The framework for my project is already there. So if I should die tomorrow, the museum will have five empty frames where my five remaining works were to have hung. If for some reason I am unable to perform in a given year, that frame will remain empty.
Are your works meant to become part of the museum’s permanent collection?
That’s not what we agreed on. My understanding is that the works are not a permanent installation. I assume they will be taken down again once the series is finished. I had the honour of being at the museum while they were renovating. The first work was created before the museum was completely renovated, while the halls were empty, and only the empty display cases were there. Only those exhibits that could not be moved remained. The large whale skeletons still hung there, covered in plastic. I entered the space as a living body among dead bodies. There was a resonance, a harmony between them and me, a skeleton that still walked around and breathed. The museum historicises these dead bodies and classifies them. It cannot rule those of us who can still walk through the halls, those of us who have life in us still. But you get a sense of death there. Death is also a feeling. And as Yvonne Rainer wrote, “feelings are facts.”
Perhaps one gets a sense of death among taxidermy and skeletons? Can you tell us about the latest iteration of the performance cycle for the University Museum?
I went back to the text I wrote for last year’s performance. I saw that I had described the death of my father in a way that came quite close to what actually happened to him.
So you described the death of your father before he passed away?
Yes. But it’s not that remarkable. His death is something I have thought about since I was a child. He has had it tough. I want to be able to talk about this universally valid experience without capitalising on his or my own pain. I object to institutions and media channels milking the “artists’ heart’s blood” in order to justify art and its existence to the public. My sick father is as uninteresting as my naked body.
The all-knowing Minerva is the leitmotif of the museum architecture. But for each year, I know less and less. Other artists and writers, dead and alive, could form corrections and companions to this narrative. In 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. I brought along Svetlana Alexievich’s book Boys in Zink [2017] with me to intersect the performance. Alexievich uses polyphonic storytelling as a form of counter-propaganda. In combination with readings from the daily news, I have brought in citations to undermine my own words and infuse polyphony. And then I saw Lene Berg’s festival exhibition Fra Far [From Father]. There was a mattress in that show, which appeared to me to be closely linked to death. It’s because I recognised it. That soaked mattress was the place where my father still reclined and later died. You only have my word for this. Does it matter whether I’m telling the truth? Berg’s exhibition explored a figure called father, who was dead. I myself have a strong need to describe events while they are happening, while we are alive. Before it’s too late. For example, the current experience of being powerless in the face of rearmament. Can a disarmed, naked body still, or again and again, be threatening? Or vulnerable? Is a ghost from the second wave of feminism relevant? Twenty minutes is just about the right amount of time to endure such a conversation. Ten years is nothing. But for an institution, it may feel long and unbearable.
The previous performance entered into a conversation with loss. And perhaps with others who are close to death. I thought about all the times I’ve feared that my father lay dead, and the thought of how our bodies could disintegrate together, merging into something greater. In 2023, when he died, I felt the act of embracing his corpse to be very similar to meeting my newborn children. An acrid smell, rather like the one wafting from a stream in the spring. That was something I didn’t know about beforehand. The reality of death coincided with Israel’s war on Gaza. Then I felt an urge to speak about this up against the flood of pictures of children’s corpses strewn in the ruins as if they were worthless. Addressing that this happens at the same time and is inconceivable and incompatible. In a Felix Gonzalez-Torres sense, a pile of candy at the Astrup Fearnley Museum is not at all about sharing experiences. Rather, it reinforces a distance from what the artist himself experienced. When you take the candy, that act is not simply convivial. Perhaps I am also taking part in an assault? There is something patronising about saying that you understand. The mystery of not knowing for sure keeps the perspective open and the bodies close to the knives.
The mattress was not the actual hub of the text I wrote, but it was one of the elements. I often go back and look at things I’ve written in the past to pick up elements that I then repeat in new performances. It is a consequence of my wanting a certain evocativeness. The words are not necessarily exactly the same, but they are performed by the same body, and as the years go by, the meaning of the repeated phrases changes.
As a result of the repetition, or as a result of the passing of time?
In the case of the text about my father’s death, over time it has gone from being fiction to becoming reality. Being able to work over a ten-year span has been a completely different experience compared to being invited to do a performance at an opening, for example. It involves a lasting commitment to the work but is also an opportunity to reflect on the fact that what you felt during the performance last time, you no longer feel.
Perhaps a natural history museum makes an excellent backdrop for precisely this work? We know that within the natural sciences, facts are changeable. For example, things that were taken as firmly fixed about certain species may have changed ten years later as the supply of available data becomes richer.
I am reminded of a comment Mariann Enge wrote about the Hamar Performance Festival, where she wondered whether younger artists in particular adapt to the audience’s limited patience and attention span. I thought that performance artists were expected to adapt to a format where the audience will perceive that what is happening is prompted by an event, such as an opening. But you may also find that such a format works against the artwork. In order to create a work that spans a long period like Vi skal ikke lage lærebøker, it is important to be clear that what I do and say may be irrelevant in a little while. But you can still share a moment together, voluntarily, in a temporary state of unity. And that is important. Being able to gather under circumstances different from the mundane ones. In order to even be able to talk about something constant, it should be obvious that one can always be wrong.
Have there been regulars among the audiences who have attended your performances for the University Museum, people who attend more than one?
Yes, there have. I’ve seen that happen many times because of the format I’ve used, involving series of performances over time. At the University Museum, there are restrictions on the number of people who can attend the performance. Given that you cannot bring an unlimited number of people into the Tower Hall, it has been important for me that the cycle should continue over a long period of time. That way, more people can see a performance. At Kunstnerforbundet [Artists’ Association, Oslo], I did eighteen performances during a three-month period [TA VARE! (Take Care), 2019]. I would bump into people around town, in all sorts of situations. For example, I was having coffee in a café, and it turned out that the woman at the till had been to one of the performances.
Do you like it, or do you find it uncomfortable when people approach you because they’ve seen your performances?
I’m happy when that happens! In a sense, it is kind of what I hope for but always think won’t happen. I usually think that no one will come to my performances. In a way, I rely on random passers-by. I direct my work equally much to those who are simply passing through. During the performances I had at Femtensesse in Aleksander Kiellands plass [Skriver for ikke å skade (Writing to Cause No Harm), 2022], I was approached by some people who had unwittingly come to the opening and seen the performance, and who then came back the next two times as well. At the opening they asked, “what’s going on?” And so I obviously told them what was going on. That’s part of the whole thing, because it’s not theatre. You have to negotiate some completely different situations.
Presumably there is a lot that realistically has to be improvised?
When speaking with the various institutions I have worked with, I have expressed very strong wishes to be able to work in the formats I want. It still feels as if the encounters with audiences take place in spite of, and not because of, the commissioning party’s framework. I’m still as pleased as ever every time it succeeds! For example, at Performa in New York in 2013 there was a lot of uncertainty embedded in what I wanted to do, and I was asked to check every single element of the work. I was told that what I wanted to do would not be possible. This has happened several times, including when I was part of Vi lever på en stjerne (We are living on a star) at the Henie Onstad art centre [2014]. The problem is that during the planning phase, I cannot tell the institution that things will unfold in a specific way that I can foresee. In fact, there are many elements that are not measurable at all. In the communication of my projects, this has often been a problem for the institution, the fact that they cannot promise anything with absolute certainty. This was even more of a difficulty when I was less established because back then I could not refer to anything either. Now those who commission works can see that I have completed projects and that things have gone well.
Can you briefly tell us about the project for Performa in 2013? What caused the institution to be unsure whether it would be possible for you to carry it out?
I did a performance at Grand Central Terminal. A partnership was entered into with the MTA [The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the company that manages public transport in New York]. I worked with an art consultant who was very uneasy about the ideological content of the work. For example, the consultant did not want me to mention that there had been an ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] demonstration at the site which resulted in the station hall being closed down. I solved this by having a talk in a Performa hub where I could speak about the project from an artist’s perspective. And I did not change the content of the text I was going to perform; I whispered it.
The station hall is a place characterised by a lot of through traffic. For example, we went to a place called The Whispering Gallery, where the acoustics allow you to hear messages transmitted through the building from the other end of the hall. I filled the corridor with the audience, and then we transmitted messages. Informally, we all know that this way of using the building is possible because people do it all the time: they meet in small gatherings, break the rules, step over barricades. It is an everyday thing.
Now, as a result of privatisation, the entire station area has been destroyed as a social meeting place. Areas that were previously accessible to the public no longer are. For example, there is this one hall that was previously furnished with oak benches. Those oak benches have now been removed in order to make it impossible to spend the night there. Previously, the building had been open twenty-four hours a day. Now it’s cordoned off, but only with barrier tape. Many people relied on staying there at night. The closure is said to have led to an increase in deaths among people who had nowhere to go.
Just the fact that the group stood by the barrier tape while I explained that there used to be benches there, enabling people to sleep, was enough to bring the police to the scene. I asked why I couldn’t cross the barrier? Then the constable quite willingly told us why we couldn’t do that. The officer told us quite a bit about this and that. The place sort of spoke for itself. If I had given advance notice that I intended to involve the audience in such interactions, I would not have been allowed to do so. But then I also cannot guarantee in advance that such meetings will occur.
There are many bodies that would probably not have been greeted with anecdotes from the police if they did peculiar things in front of a group of spectators inside Grand Central Terminal; they would have provoked far stronger reactions. You may enjoy a certain privileged access due to the kind of body you have, for example its ethnicity.
Yes. But if I wasn’t an artist, would I have been stopped if I had crawled around the streets naked? As an addict and psychiatric patient, my father was jailed and failed in the health care system; he was unprotected by his identity markers and eventually suffered a premature death. A family friend was amongst the last women in Norway to be lobotomised, in 1974. Women were in a completely different situation then. It is still important to ask yourself: Who has agency? When did I get it? Will I still have this agency next year? Can I have an abortion this year? Will I be allowed to have one next year? I have found no better way of showing absence and gradual disappearance than by constantly sampling what is possible over time. There is a significant amount of artistic work out there that has not been canonised, and artists who, at the time of writing, are blacklisted due to ethnicity and political affiliation. Why should I serially produce objects in a studio rather than crawl along the street for as long as I can? It is possible to topple colonial statues by being a lightweight, and leave the museum halls to other artists.
Ila Pensjonat, which houses the gallery Femtensesse, was originally built to alleviate the housing shortage among women, and in its time housed the first women’s shelter in the Nordic countries before it became a hospice run by the substance abuse authorities. This story seems to have influenced the performance you did in connection with your exhibition at Femtensesse. What do you mean when you say that a place speaks for itself?
That I like to join in the story that goes with the place. This doesn’t have to mean that my story is [air quotes] true. Sometimes what is close to me can migrate. Such as when I wrote a story about my father’s death which coincided with some other circumstances – a pain that is not my own, and that I do not claim either. Who am I to speak about other people’s suffering? But nothing is too heavy for you to create something out of it.
Ila Pensjonat was also a municipal studio building until recently. There are many artists lacking a studio that wander the streets of Oslo now.
To apply a radical perspective: Where can an artist function within such gravely heavy financial conditions and pursue questions without being interrupted? Where can one maintain such free, independent activity? Take, for example, the project at the University Museum in Bergen. In the first meetings we had to talk to working committees, the museum director, to everyone. It was the person in charge of communication at the time who said “we are not supposed to make textbooks.” And I thought no, exactly, that’s not what we should do. There were echoes of Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto [1965]. It seems as if there is this fear of art. In that sense, a kind of test is taking place. For me, my projects are about being, not about speaking about something. It is impossible to stand alone in such a situation. As an artist, you have to arrange things for a community, and you have to take responsibility for that community.
You have made exhibitions that comprise performances and objects such as drawings and sculpture. Why do you create physical objects for your performances?
The objects arise out of the performances. They are not talismans or documentation. They are objects I use in connection with the conversations. I have caught myself saying that, together with the performance, they become a kind of total work of art. The objects are a separate element that I can bring in when necessary. Or they might be rocks or steel to climb on, trying to say something about the room I stood in last time. That is why I have reused the few larger items I have made, making modifications based on the new room they are now in. Not an edition, but an echo. They show accumulated activity. It might be wrong to say that the objects do not document the works; perhaps they represent a way of archiving, for me and those who have been present.
Now that you bring it up, I am interested in your views on documentation and documents. I recently had some interesting conversations with the students at the art academy where you teach, discussing the difference between a work and a document. We read Walter Benjamin, including his views on that distinction. It was amusing to talk about these things as if they were incompatible entities. A work may happen to be a document, but a document may not simply happen to be a work.
The retelling of a performance is also a form of documentation. You cannot claim that a photo or video recording of a performance to be included in a collection is an adequate way of capturing a performance. Handling and caring for a performance is a problem. And it is important that it should remain a problem. The gap that remains between documentation and experience is important. Performance is often relegated to the communication and education budget. The body that performs is not always approved as a material in budgeting. It costs an arm and a leg. Institutions use non-committal, individual performances to entertain, feminist-wash, and rainbow-wash their programming. That is the arena to which you are invited. That is the Achilles heel of this medium. Also, no one will preserve the work you do as a performance artist, and it is frowned upon to bring a series of objects and say, “all this is the work.” It is inconvenient for the institution.
Not so much for the acquisition committees or conservators, but perhaps for the art historians?
Exactly. When it is not possible to speak about something, when there is art that has happened that cannot be recounted. When cowardice has arisen in the art institution, or a reluctance to talk about or take care of something. Last autumn there was this debate about whether the institutions should preserve their aura, exempt and free from ideology. That there is some advantage to be had in separating the work from its context. In a performance context, objects that cannot stand alone, which are actually bad in themselves, can become part of a totality when coupled with an action. You have to live with the discomfort and inconvenience. You can never guarantee that it won’t be uncomfortable.
Now you sound very much like a performance artist.
[Laughs]
