Time has been slowed down so that the human eye can follow the water’s wild, uninterrupted fall from top to bottom. There is a certain meditative calm about it, but fierce white noise of the sound track adds a powerful energy to the impression made by the installation. Standing in front of this reproduction of a natural phenomenon that has surprisingly been moved into the centre of the city, the visitor has a physical sense of the huge forces of nature, and the smallness of his or her own body.
The title “I am The River” derives from the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, and indicates that man is subject to the flow of time. We are created by time, time flows so to speak inside us, but time also carries us along. We each have our own subjective time, we are born, grow old and die, but we are also part of a larger time, outside us. As the poet Morten Søndergaard wrote of the installation: ”The work is a mirror for our strange life, which knows that one day it will perish, but also that we are alive in the midst of it. We endure like a waterfall in the midst of time.”
“I am The River” is a quite simple work, a modern landscape painting, a study of the power and beauty of nature and at the same time a dizzying plunge into the mysterious space of existence and metaphysics.
