HENRIK HELLSTENIUS

In Golden Fleece, the figures apparently move freely around, in a space between, in transit, between meaning and non-meaning. They are on their way somewhere, and from something. They are governed by private and individual desire and longing, and at the same time they take part in intricate patterns of automated and ritual interconnections. They are trapped both by coincidence and fate.

You can get glimpses of post-modernity’s drama of intimacy, probing references to the iconography of Martha Graham, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Maria Callas, but also non-abstract re-painting of the ancient Greek myth of Medea. Yes, maybe that is the case: Love, escape and betrayal between Medea and Jason (including, of course, the young princess Glauke, the destructive female execution of the treesome), put into play around the quest for a golden fleece?

Or are they, the figurants, not protagonists at all, not main characters, but just belonging to an almost wiped-out and ridiculously vanishing choir? Merely a bunch of groupies, a fake-argonautic complaints choir on anti-depressive medication?

We would all like to play the title role in our own life, but often end up as extras in somebody else’s fragmented mythological landscape. And maybe that is precisely what touches us.

Kai Johnsen