Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1

My Lindh’s film Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 1 is the first in a series of planned video works. It portrays a landscape. This happens to be an Icelandic landscape, and as such an essentially stereotypical image. At first, it appears to be a still image, a postcard, until some slight unremarkable movement reveals that it is a film. The image slowly slides horizontally, but panning in two different directions. In this translation of quiet dislocation, the embodiment of a landscape starts to disassemble itself through a study of origin and nature. And the film seems to ask whether the very idea of a landscape is a construction. There is a passage by Simone de Beauvoir that comes to mind, where she writes how she would like to become the landscape in front of her: “I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance”, she writes. “But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat.”