A group of youngsters, an adult teacher, and a slightly younger guest teacher sit around a table knitting and drawing absent-mindedly in notebooks. They have coffee in their thermoses and the school looks a mess. Sharp institutional light shines over the gathering, and the somewhat sleepy evening school and everyday life atmosphere is unmistakable. The camera is handheld; this really looks like reality. Sara Sjölin – the aforementioned guest teacher – claps awkwardly with a toy-like clapboard. The young people and the teacher from Fyn’s Laboratory for Young Art (FLUK) are set in motion with a film project, which now has a hint of fictional documentary about it.
In collaboration with Sjölin, the students are making a film that takes place at the local (and, apparently, quite legendary) eatery Jette’s Diner in Svendborg, and they run through their script below the communal white lights. And so, a kind of docu-soap begins: actual employees alongside FLUK students; actual diner guests alongside Sjölin herself, all romping about at the diner. Twelve more or less grotesque scenes then unfold.
On the occasion of this show, the basement of the Copenhagen venue Lagune Ouest is more a cinema than a gallery: nothing but acoustic panels and a row of chairs face the wall where Jettes Dinerskole (Jette’s Diner School, 2024) is screened – and it’s just always nice when video works get to stand alone. “Speech” is mentioned as one of the primary components of Sara Sjölin’s practice, and this work is no exception. If we can talk about a trademark for an artist who is likely unknown to most people outside the younger art scene in Copenhagen/Central Europe, Sjölin’s would surely be talk and voice.
With a characteristic, almost slanderous, slowness, the artist’s own voice usually accompanies her video works, monotonously like a field being plowed with distinguished Swedish sentences, but never boring. It might have to do with my own practically unconditional love for the Swedish language’s sharp articulation and terrific vocabulary, but to me, Swedish possesses a (humorous) quality. This is especially the case with Sjölin. She thoroughly chews her words, which are served as artistic dishes and immediately become protagonists of a kind.
This is also the case in Jettes Dinerskole, but the exceptional Swedish has been slightly Danish-ised so that the students can follow along when the artist directs. There are literally too many cooks in the kitchen. The students have apparently created their own scenes in groups, and this limits Sjölin’s central role and makes the film significantly more smashed-home-video-like than previous works, which, despite their handheld camerawork and grainy visuals have seemed more consistently conceptual.
Seemingly, the students meet one evening at Jette’s Diner to direct and play their respective scenes in some kind of casual narrative. Sjölin films, acts, and directs, which always imbues her work with the feeling of a collective endeavour, maxing out on collectivity but as a literal group situation rather than a pseudo-theoretical art buzzword. It’s un-pretty and great.
First, they childishly make disgusting burgers with shrimp and corn and other ingredients that suck. Then another archetypal teenage situation unfolds: food (in this case, lousy nachos) is very immaturely not being shared with friends. At some point, the diner employees have to sign a so-called “release contract,” and subsequently something resembling both food control and a cinematic expedition through the industrial refrigerators begins. Sjölin starts eating the two disgusting burgers in the toilet. A school student stops by for a late after-work beer. Towards the end a Sarah Lucas reference in the form of fried egg breasts is thrown in, punctuating, in its clumsy obviousness, the fact that Jette’s Dinerskole is an artwork. Slightly lame incidents occur one after another, and again and again, we have to giggle at how cracked everything is.
The work is largely carried by Sjölin’s humour, whose greatest quality is that it seems unimpressed with itself. And this is not about the law-of-Jante-demand to not believe too much in yourself, but about how humour works best when it keeps itself in check. When the actual laugh is never really there, but is replaced by the almost lazily dry and deadpan timing that Sjölin masters. And of course, humour is also a visual element. Sjölin’s imagery is never really spectacular, but that doesn’t mean that both the camerawork and editing aren’t remarkable.
Three or four different cameras tumble around in the quite unappetising kitchen. The film chaotically jumps between footage shot by the students (on smartphones) and footage shot by the artist, as well as footage shot by a third photographer of Sjölin filming and talking. The docu-soap feeling intensifies when a serious-faced Sjölin informs this third photographer that “this is an international documentary,” while she and a handful of students uncover the presence of cooked pasta and frozen chicken in the diner’s cold room.
The fun becomes thematic with the very authentic teenage atmosphere permeating everything: a blushing enthusiasm about disgusting food and goofing around and indulging in community. This feeling of unrestrained school project creativity done in a free and trusting manner beautifully mirrors the Waldorf mindset the artist herself grew up with.
The film’s opening frame reads (in classic Waldorf font): “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Besides being a giggly sentence in light of how the Diner School unfolds from there, it’s also a genuinely nice hint at the will to free creativity, which is surely one of the pillars of Steiner philosophy – at least in terms of schooling. It was only revealed to me later that Jette’s Diner School, when spoken, sounds like Jette’s Steiner School.
