When ceramicist Halvor Skiftun Digernes asked if I wanted to collaborate on a project, I was intrigued. Clay is an incredibly flexible material. It can be shaped into all things, both abstract and functional objects. Precisely this flexibility is what likens it to text, although the ceramic objects are much more obvious as concrete objects than text is, in the sense they are present in their materiality, and that they are often perceived and judged by this material presence.

Our idea was for texts to be written on several ceramic objects. The texts should foster conceptions of objects, but existing objects should also give ideas for the texts. These objects should, after being made, be placed different places, where they will stay for a long time, so we can see what this placement might do to the objects.

(How long does a text survive? How solid is clay as a material to store text in/on? When is the text lost? When does it acquire new meaning? When does it stop being a text? Would its destruction make it better, more beautiful? What about all the other texts which throughout history have been written and lost, or crumbled, become something else?)

The first object we made, a tablet, is hidden in a mountainside in the forest north of Oslo, and is engraved with this text:

how
how long
how long does
how long does it
how long does it take
how long does it take to
how long does it take to build
how long does it take to build a
how long does it take to build a ruin

seek shelter in what has passed
from what will come to pass
in what is not there
in what is not
in what is
in what
in
in
remains
beginnings

(translation)

The next objects, four rectangular tablets, which together make a square, are placed on a rooftop close to Oslo city centre, and has this text engraved in a circle:

circles inside circles inside circles inside circles inside circles inside circles inside circles

(translation)

sirkler inne i sirkler inne i sirkler inne i sirkler inne i sirkler inne i sirkler inne i sirkler

(original)

When the rectangles are put together in a different order than the original, the harmony of the circle will be broken, the cycle disturbed.

For now, the last set of objects are three jars on which the two previous texts are mixed together. The jars are to be buried, to greet worms and other crawlies.

The plan is to make six more series of one or several objects. One of these series will be objects which have a clear use determined by their context. A family with a new-born child will get a set of plates with the first text. For another, the idea is to shape an object like a turtle shell – a not to the turtle shells which held the first Chinese writing approximately 3200 years ago, part of the Oracle Bone script tradition. Other objects will be burned and hardened by fire, before they are placed at the bottom of the ocean.

In five years, we will retrieve all the objects.
One option is to smash them.
Mix the remnants with fresh clay.
Start over.

 -       Bård Torgersen