Digging a Hole, performance video, 2015

What is at stake in the work Digging a Hole  seems to be nonsense. Indeed, that is what it is. This Sisyphean repetitive act of re-digging a simple hole on a sandy shore is of course totally futile.

However, the progress of the digging action seems immeasurable and the sand bed looks precisely the same after the flood tide, it is not a meaningless action. Thus, the digging man, fighting the mathematical calculable wheel of nature is touching upon the impossibility of mankind´s struggle with nature.

The rhythm of the dualistic and endless re-digging and re-filling process conveys both eternity and the repetitions of acts within the Tao te Ching concept of time and immortality in which the complementary elements of life and death is a continued recycling process of orderly reproduction.

Thus the struggle between the extreme power of energy caused by the back and forth of the tidal cycle rhythm and the man do force the surface of the sand bed to be resilient in the way it respectively act and adapt to the power of the tidal wave and the man. The force of the flood tide declines the foreign interaction of the hole. When the digger returns back to where he left off, the hole is refilled with sand by the flood tide and he restart his circa-tidal activity.

In this way, the negation process of the hole is possible as it can only exist as a very ephemeral temporality – in a glimpse – then it is deconstructed by the vast power of the flood tide. All the polyrhythmic energy which is released by the digger and his foreign interaction with the sand are then absorbed and reversed into the energy of the tidal cycle rhythm.

However, by entrance of the body of the digger into the scene in the Digging a Hole the performer embody the ordinary man digging a hole in complete loneliness. In this way, does the performer in Digging a Hole on a metaphorical level, represent a nihilistic erosion of the extraordinary, an anti-hero and a common, ordinary everyman.

Thus by the device of repetition and the simplicity of the digging act the performer do play with the concepts of triviality and banality where he intentionally eroding the extraordinary. Thus, the digging act is prevalent logic related to a non-art category.

By seeking to contradict conventional logically types of categories of relationships the work are playing with the perceptions of classifications systems. Thus by performing the ordinary skill of digging a hole with a spade and then afterward putting emphasize on these acts by exposing the work to the public the semantic meaning of digging are diverted by the situation. And the table are thus turned a little angle and leave room for our perceptions to be viewed a little different.

.