In the Copenhagen University building, KUA 2 on Amager, Eva Koch has installed 5 video projections in the stairwell that connects the five levels of the Saxo Institute with the Department of Archaeology on the top floor. On this floor the picture extends from wall to wall; on the other floors the work is shown in the descending stairwell. The video, which runs in a loop of two hours, shows recordings of Icelandic waterfalls, filmed at high speed and now replayed at slow speed, which gives them an extreme sharpness of detail, irrespective of whether the video shows close-ups or zooms out to a broader view. The video’s pictures are accompanied by sound, which can switch from soft white noise to a murmuring trickle, and which like the pictures is composed in a vertical sequence. On the top floor we see the falls from above and the water falling over the edge. In the three middle projections the pictures of water are now and then covered by pictures of people’s faces. Children, young people, grown-ups and old men and women. 150 quite randomly selected people of today. When the faces appear, the sound stops. In the five stairwells the projections have the effect of landscape paintings, windows opening on the world. But also as a reminder that nature is there, an uncontrollable force independent of man. That time has passed before us and will pass after us. That our lives are part of a flow.
The title of the permanent installation was taken from the Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges’ essay Otras Inquisiciones from 1952.
