In May 2023, artist, performer and researcher, Danae Theodoridou, was hosted by Baltic Art Center. During this residency, Danae looks into how citizens assemble on Gotland, and around which causes.

Parallel to her own work, Danae ghosted Kalle Brolin during his residency at Baltic Art Center, joining him in his research on Gotland, following, reflecting and exchanging over their artistic processes and the methods.

Danae also participated in the On Languages and Landscapes of Mobilisation Symposium, on May 31st, 2023.

Danae reflects later on her experience of “ghosting” Kalle Brolin and this role that was assigned to her by the ON MOBILISATION project in her text Only here could Bergman and Tarkovsky have made their films…Performing the ghost in Gotland:

“It starts with a suspicion (what is this forced collaboration about?) and a certain guilt (how can someone – in this case Kalle – do his work while at the same time having someone else -in this case me – asking questions, time, attention?). How could I intervene in another’s working process? How to not become an annoying burden?

It then evolves into an existential question: what is my role here? What am I supposed to do? What does a ‘ghost’ normally do?

And it ends (at least from the side of the ghost) as a triple act of:

1. 1. resistance: the ghost as a great opportunity to slow down, ‘waste time’, against the continuously accelerated working rhythm of capitalism that mainly executes things, often with only superficial results. When there is not much to do, other than following someone, time feels different and holds another type of potential…
   2. mutual generosity: as a ghost one learns, as Bojana Cvejic has argued, to ‘stand under’, i.e. support, before she ‘under-stands. During our days of exchange with Kalle, we both learned how/when to be there (for each other) and how/when to leave space and (dis)appear; how and when one should (not) be alone.
   3. emerging knowledge: when one does not (need to) ‘know’, when one has no expectations or nothing to prove (to the demanding art market), then things come only as rich, unexpected surprises of new insights, appearing from different directions in ways that one cannot (and should not) control. Maintaining such positioning towards knowledge is a core concern I have in my work and, at the same time, the greatest challenge we all face, I guess, as (art) workers in such harsh neoliberal contexts. Most of the times we fail but maybe the important thing is trying…”

Read the full text HERE