Opening speech at the exhibition of Kirsten Klein’s “Mytesteder”, January 24, 2025 – see the exhibition until March 30 at Vendsyssel Kunstmuseum. When I met you, Kirsten, for the first time, I had met you several times before. That’s how it seemed. When I came up to you on a windy (it’s always windy on Mors) November day in 2009, I was struck by recognition. I couldn’t say it, because I was a journalist at NORDJYSKE, where I was employed at the time, and my job was not to talk about me, but to get you to talk. An absurd task, really. Why should you be forced to use words when you tell us so much with pictures? The realization of the absurdity hit me hard, because I lived and live by words, but I felt with a heavy pain that they had no validity that even approached your pictures. Still, you welcomed me and patiently circled my questions. Among other things, we talked about where the pictures come from. “They probably come from somewhere where it hurts,” you replied. I didn’t know then, but I know now. That’s where the recognition takes hold. From that place where life is not only good, but also painful. Back then, I hadn’t lost my youngest boy, the pain of my life was milder then, but some was there, and we talked about children coming or not, about being a child myself. About longing and being rootless, being moved around, the roots that were not allowed to take hold. They weren’t the most respected when we were growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the roots, certainly not the tiny roots of little people. You talked about the child you were when you had to move away from your sister, father and grandmother when your mother took you to Lovns Bredning. Who would you go with now? You went out. Out into the wind. Nature became your “ally” you said. Out there you could grow. I guess you can’t expect nature to swallow up your pain. The loss of what will never come and what is gone forever. I think it’s more like nature leaves it alone. It’s just there. It’s not wrong or destructive. It’s just there. Like trees and clouds and puddles. It’s just there. Nature is just there, but it’s active. To be in it is not to be in something that doesn’t matter or something that doesn’t care. It interferes in your life – as we interfere in it – for better or worse. In many ways, we are fundamentally separated from nature. Even if you live in it, which you do, and you do. We are separate, we are culture, the other is nature, but it’s not like that. Danish nature is a cultural landscape. Everywhere man has left his mark. Sown, walked, harrowed, harvested, felled and planted. In your photos there are rarely people, but they are always there. As if they left just before you snapped the shot. Or standing just outside the frame.
That’s how it seems to me to stand in front of your pictures. They may seem abandoned, but they are full of life. I stand there and move into a landscape that is initially two-dimensional, but after a few moments takes on several dimensions. Not the usual three, but the fourth, time. Time is present in your images. Not only as lost time, as something that has passed, but also something that is quivering, waiting to happen. I don’t know what it is that has happened or will happen, but the tension strikes me as a spectator. Whenever I look at the image, it will seem that way. The American-born, later British, poet and Nobel Prize winner T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) writes with many words in his long poems about how man can be present in time and timelessness at the same time. In the poem “Dry Salvages” in his 1943 collection “Four Quartets” he writes:
“For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen”
It’s these unattended moments, these moments inside and outside of time, the ones that disappear in a flash of sunlight or are the wild thyme we don’t see. But you do. You spot those moments out there. And give them to us. In the catalog, Mikael Wivel writes that your images update the roughly 200-year-old paintings of nature romantics such as English Joseph Mallord William Turner and Danish Johan Thomas Lundbye and the next generations. But they are much more than that, he admits, and I’m glad he’s moving on. Because your pictures have comments on the future of the world – as Turner’s did, incidentally, with his snorting steam train splintering the sun and speeding into a future he was excited about. With you, it’s more a reminder of all that we as humans will lose if we don’t take the conversation with the planet more seriously in the time to come. There are no environmental banners in your images, but there is eternity. There is a realization that one time is not more important than the other. Our time does not rank higher than the past and the future. That’s what nature reveals every spring, with every flower that blooms again and every rock that looks so unchanging. We humans are out there hunting, picking and gathering. We use nature to de-stress. No offense, but the relationship between humans and nature could do with an update. Nature isn’t just a place to make sure we can work even harder so we can grow even more. Is it? Your images tear apart our consumerist approach to nature. They allegedly hang there and consolidate the eternal power of nature. It’s not for us. But with us. If we choose it to be. Exhibitions here are called myth places, and in the catalog there are an incredible number of people in the pictures. Even on the cover. In some of them, you follow pilgrims who go to a place they find sacred, and as Bishop Elof Westergaard writes, these places, places of myth, tell us about “that which is the core of human life. They remind us of where we belong, where we come from”, that “the earth is calling”. And it’s not really important whether it’s exactly our place. It may seem important in an age of individualism like ours that you have found your place, your place in the world. But no, the important thing is not the place or us, but the call from the earth. The voice that calls us all as one. Everyone in the “Great Community”, as theology professor Niels Henrik Gregersen calls people, living and dead and not yet born. It’s a rather insurmountable amount of people, but they are the ones they crawl up to, the pilgrims, those who know and those they will never meet. Those who have walked the paths before, and those who live on the other side of the calling earth. This earth wants something from us, you show me with the pictures. But what is it? We listen. Trying to converse. Honoring and honoring what connects us.
Lining up stones in circles, dancing and lighting fires. Singing. We’re still doing it. Several of the myth sites are not far from here. The “Troll Church” giant mound at Store Restrup is one of them. Gammel Rubjerg Cemetery is another. Fjords and streams. Hills and forest floors. Inside Rold Forest in Gravlev Ådal is one of my mythical places, a row of stones from the Bronze Age that precisely frames the summer and winter solstice. I wrote about it in my debut book, which turns 10 years old in a few days, “I met Jesus” about a long series of spiritual experiences I’ve had – both in Spain and at home in Rold Skov, where we lived at the time. In the book, I provide a short excerpt of our conversation at your home.
” I asked her if her places were loaded.
– Yes, she replied. – I’m not praying. It’s not like that. My spirituality is tied to the landscape.”
The landscape binds spirituality, spirit and body, us. All of us. We are tied to the landscape.
Thank you, Kirsten, for showing us.
And happy birthday!
