Performance artist Simone Aaberg Kærn has told a spectacular personal docutale (in everything but print) of how she flew from Denmark to Afghanistan in an old and very small airplane. Kærn and her partner Magnus Bejmar's way of describing the project reminds me of various opening statements in texts by wallraffers and other concept-conscious reporters: "You can be upset about the war in Afghanistan", thus Magnus Bejmar, "or women's rights and write a letter to the editor and sit in a café and mope for three months, but come on, do something..." Like Günter Wallraff, Jakob Boeskov, Norah Vincent and others, Kærn had nothing but a basically useless indignation and a very abstract idea of things which nonetheless - like Wallraff, Boeskov, Vincent - she decides to act upon by assigning herself a very concrete task. Magnus Bejmar again:
We coined the term docutale. Reality told as a fairytale. Which fits the performance concept well, too: if you prod reality a bit by adding a new element to it, it shifts, which forces you to look at it differently. So it is with Simone, the flyer. She is the object we add to the world, that people have to relate to as we go along.I'll get back to Simone Aaberg Kærn's story when I've had a chance to see the movie. I'm looking forward to it, even if I was never very fond of The Little Prince.
4 comments:
Though not writing in her own blood (because as you said, she manifests herself in everything but print), Simone Aaberg Kærn is indeed investing herself - her life and her persona - in assuring that the story reaches its end.
And, as Kærn is telling her stories by being part of them, she is inventing an engaging genre which makes me curious. About technicalities, about politics, about the limits of the sky, and last but not least about Simone.
First person in vapour?
Yes, Kærn's project strikes me as comprising most of the characteristics that I've been looking for in written reportage, including, yes, exactly: technicalities! as you've noticed -the practical dimensions, the specifics of the self-designed task.
And making a reader/spectator curious on those levels that you mention is a noble ambition for spectacular, personal reporting too. Kærn might well begin to serve as an explicit model - if only by analogy - in my work on journalism. I'll have to find an opportunity to see that movie... it sounds as if you managed that? and I'd like to hear some more.
I did get to see the movie at the Asbæk exhibition a few years back, where even the plane was exhibited (yay! says the technicality enthusiast).
Try to get hold of "Sisters In The Sky" as well because she uses the same method in obtaining access to the old women's pilot stories: by bringing her Self into the story.
If you're looking into other fields where the "I" is often prominent, you might want to turn to anthropology. Many anthropologists could be mentioned here as examples of social scientists who bring their selves into the act of representing others' lives.
The (often male) Hero-Anthropologist's monology is a genre in itself, and with him into the field, the hero often brings stereotypical props like The Notebook, The Pipe, and The Vest (as a warzone reporter, almost), uniform-like. He survives life among savages in the wilderness, far away from home.
But instead I will mention someone who brings her self on stage in a different manner. Not by representing herself as a hero(ine) but as a vulnerable scientist: Ruth Behar "The Vulnerable Observer" (1996).
Anthropology can - could - indeed enrich studies of journalistic reporting, and thanks! for providing me with a specific place to start looking into it. The title of Behar's book sounds promising as a way of conceptualizing the role of anyone doing field work.
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