From the exhibition guide:
"On a large sheet of graph paper, several timelines of different orders of magnitude stretch from EARTH FORMED to SECOND SOLAR CATASTROPHE. Olaf Stapledon's handwritten words, scattered in clusters between temporal extremes, anchor the plot of
Last and First Men, a work of pure imagination with a scope almost unthinkable in the churning surf of the present.
A few months back, on a visit to Svolvaer, the conversation turned to the band A-ha. One thing led to another until I was holding a portrait of Morten Harket in my hands. The autographed photocopy came with a story, ordinary pop magic that broke through the archipelago's geological envelope for a brief moment.
Stapledon and Harket's words spill into a room together, deforming the time-feel of the place. Reactivated after thirty years of suspended animation, Harket's voice is reconfigured to synthetically haunt the dry-docks, tunnels and sports halls of Lofoten's workdays and childhoods. "I reached inside myself through time" it says, simultaneously containing and contained by Stapledon's trajectories, which telescope into the distant past and future."
Commissioned by
LIAF 2015: Disappearing Acts.
Curated by Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen.
Supported by
Culture Ireland.
With thanks to Sven Anderson, Marco Conceição, Dermot Furlong, Fergus Kelly, Duncan Murphy, Tim Redfern, Steve Whetman and Andy Sawyer, Liverpool University Science Fiction Archive.