THE VALLEY
Åse Løvgren and Stine Gonsholt
“THE VALLEY (Dalen) is an idea, a fact or event that you already know, which helps you understand or make a judgment about another situation. The Valley transcends the specific territorial boundaries and has entered a world that consists of things fundamentally in motion".
Supported by Arts Council Norway, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, The City of Bergen, Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts (BEK), OCA and Norwegian Knitting Industry Museum.
Sound by Alexander Rishaug
THE VALLEY
THE VALLEY (Dalen) is the title of the video by Åse Løvgren and Stine Gonsholt. The work depicts the place called Dale which translates into The Valley. This place is still to a degree synonymous with the valley ́s former textile industry, when the factory buildings were the pivotal center of society. Today the old industrial societies are no longer aligned with their former cosmology. The power of the industrial architecture has lost its status and its surpluses have been left open to new arenas.
The radical new industry that has occupied the old textile factory buildings is digital mining. The buildings are now housing a large server park, mining for the global cryptocurrency - Bitcoin. The textile industry was crucial during the industrial revolution, and has played a major part in laying the foundations for our advanced societies. By connecting the textile industry to the pervasiveness of digital technology in the world today, the video untangles how technology is intertwined with natural resources, local histories, and global economy.
In the video, Dale (The Valley) is used as a prism to look at global changes related to economy, production, digitization, and trade. Løvgren and Gonsholt investigate how these processes affect the site’s status and the relationship between material and immaterial qualities. The moving images and its soundscape leave the nature of Dale and its landscape as the protagonist of the film.
Åse Løvgren
Åse Løvgren (b.1976) is a visual artist educated at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and the University of Bergen. She works in a number of formats where collaboration is often central, has experience as a curator, co-artistic research leader, and project manager and organizer of various projects within the art field.
Stine Gonsholt
Stine Gonsholt (b.1973), is a Norwegian artist based in Skien, Norway. Gonsholt is working within a variety of lens-based media, in parallel with collaborative projects including experimental video, mixed media installations and artist books. She has also produced a series of public commissions.
Gonsholt's projects examines topics related to development processes within an interdisciplinary, global context; Changes within local communities as a consequence of global transformation, is a main point of interest. As of 2017, Gonsholt has developed this project in collaboration with the visual artist Åse Løvgren. The focus of the project is global transitions related to production and technology, how such processes leave their mark on the landscapes and alters our understanding of a place. The project looks for such traces or prints, which are then processed visually and materially. The fascination with how digital production, which is often thought of as immaterial and free-flowing across national borders, also has a material side, is central to the work.
