Prologue
Updated: Aug 29, 2025
Beginning
This is a beginning. A purge. A towering stack of magazines I’ve hoarded for years, always telling myself they’d be useful—that they held vital information, inspiration for future art projects. But after endless moves, hauling them around, storing them like relics, the truth is clear: I never used them. Not once. Now, they have to go.
But before I throw them out, I will make a novel: Travelling through these stacks of magazines, I will select, copy and re-make texts, images and narratives. Together they will form a new narrative; a novel in fragments. I will use the format of a blog to publish a first in-progress-version of the novel.
Knipsu Fight Cage
Last year, I exhibited 250 A4-drawings at Knipsu Fight Cage in Bergen — no theme, just daily improvisations, always on A4. Ulf, one of the curators, guarded the show for three months, studying the drawings obsessively. His suggestion stuck with me: "It's a novel. Fragmented, multidirectional—like contemporary fiction."
Image-novel
On this clue, I'm now starting an image-novel (billedroman), partly inspired by a novel by the Danish artist Jytte Rex. Her work never left me, unlike other youthful influences. Dreamy, political, personal. Her book is structured in 10 visual chapters—portraits, silent narratives—with only scattered text, more like open fields of interpretation. It looks like this:
Please note the genre: - AN IMAGE-NOVEL. A novel of images. To exercise my method, here is a first series of ‘image-translations’ from "I haven't closed an eye". Some of them containing self-portraits of Jytte Rex herself.
1-7: Prologue
Notes:
1: Translation without the rhyming: She sat endlessly at the kitchen table and cried. A short summer, she sang. Then she sat again, endlessly, at the kitchen table. Soft Meeting. Hour Mouth. Linger Souls. Shame Him. Shelf Violin. Glow Dance. Fear Safe. Longing Harbor. Streams Dreams. Mirror Steep. Crackled Roasted. Oh No! FEAR SAFE!
2: The place where the crows can't be bothered to go out and turn. Where the Ten Commandments don't apply and where women are thirsty.
3: Reconstruction of the Dancers. Gallery Operetta in Five Acts.
1: The Paths, Part One.
2: Gustav and Ramona.
3: The Garden of Passion,
Scene 2: The Horror-Laden Speech.
4: The Dark Love of the Wild Heirs.
5: The Paths, Part Two.
Scene 2: Magical Evening
Scene 3: Morality
Scene 4: The Return.
4: I was with her in her final days. I thought: how sad that she—though she dies young and beautiful—has only me to close her eyes and dress her.
5: I'm a bit uncertain about this image—is it acceptable to use a photo where she's nude? Is that even possible? I mean, it’s possible for her, of course, but it’s different when it’s me, a male artist reusing her material. And who is he, the man with the mustache?
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