Week 1, Nathalie Djurberg's 'Claymations'

Claymation is a service mark used for an animation process in which clay figurines are manipulated and filmed to produce an image of lifelike movement.


What i think the term 'surrealistic Garden of Eden' means is that Djurberg's installation experiment is oddly dreamlike and unreal. She has almost created her own 'Garden of Eden' from hell. The term 'all that is natural goes awry' means that what we expect and what we think is normal it will be the totally opposite. Djurberg creates things that people wont expect and will get us thinking about the unreal.

Djurberg confronts us with many different'Complexity of emotions'. The stories deal with topics such as war, violence, sexuality, sadism ans assault in an investigation of the darker side of the human soul. Their sexual and sacrilegious encounters are just pretext to highlight preserve games of power and submission. AS the catalog of biennale says : through these minutely composed sequences of stop motion animations, djurberg toys with societies perceptions of night and wrong, exposing our own innate fears of what we do not understand and illustrating the complexity that arrises when we are confronted with these emotions.

Djurbergs stop-motion animations are hand-modeled plasticine puppets. They almost remind me of TV programmes when i was little. Djurberg's stories have a lot in common with traditional folktales. They deal with archetypical themes and involve traditional roles as the good, the bad and the kind helper. The films also have animals as characters e.g. the wolf, the bear and the tiger. As in tales strange and magical things happen in Djurberg's films; animals speak, trees walk and humans fly and talk with animals. Like in traditional tales the films have shocking and gruesome elements which occur after the narrative turning-point in the story. After this turn of events the films no longer look like children's TV ­ but rather as a scary x-rated fantasy without any moral.(Helle Ryberg, curator, 2005)

Artists are always looking for different ways to capture and inspire their audience and i think this is why they are so interested in turning something innocent and sweet into something disturbing. It shows they are thinking in different ways and go beyond what we expect.


Djurbergs work is very disturbing but i was very intrigued by all her work. Her work is very different from any other artists and show many different stories and emotions. The music by Hans Berg in the films is dominating and with its almost psychopathic cheerful rhythm it hints to the fact that there's something wrong. The music she also uses creates a set mood for the audience to feel they are apart of the work. You almost get into a mind set of what is happening around you.

References:

http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/10/nathalie-djurberg-who-won-the.php
http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2008/04/there-are-very-very-few.php
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/6886/nathalie-djurberg-experiment-at-venice-art-biennale-09.html
http://artnews.org/artist.php?i=1211
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Claymation