Camera (2020). Installation with projected video, 14’, loop. Stillimage from video.

“In Erlingsson’s ‘Camera’ the body appears as a surface, an anonymous, shadowy shape agains the light. I have never met a ghost, but I have often felt a haunting of a person, an event, of values and of habits. I have also occasionally felt my own being as a ghostly transparency, detached from the materiality of my surroundings and the bodies in it. It is this sensation of detachment, a form of weakness, my body remembers when watching Erlingsson’s video. Light leaks into the dark and the dark into the light. Things appear just to disappear. The body is present in the role of a translator, a mediator, trying to create the perfect conditions for an image to appear. An image that never quite reveals itself. Or perhaps it is doing the opposite: guarding the things hidden into the darkness from the touch of the light? The body seems to be trapped in this liminal space, eternally adjusting the amount of light entering into the room,  like a shutter of the camera. The time in the room circles and layers creating a vortex with no beginning nor end.

In Erlingsson’s work the body traces the logic of a system creating an event. An event that draws my attention to the process of seeing more than to the thing that is seen. It performs the connection of the eye, the body and the surrounding world. It performs the exchange of seeing and being seen. For isn’t this the way the world appears to us? Through an ongoing process of adjusting and filtering. With our tentacle hands and thin skin trying to find the right balance of light and dark. Trying to focus, to frame, to make sense. Pretending to see everything while actually holding onto a thin beam. A tiny leak, a crack, that forms our universe. The eye is about to open. Light glows through the eyelid as a promise of the sun behind it. The window is a window of possibilities, the world about to alter.”  - Essi Kausalainen

Read: When the world was alive by Essi Kausalainen