Videographer, edit, documentation: Pieter-Jan van Damme
Supported by: Arts Promotion Center Finland
Photos (still from video): Pieter-Jan van Damme
Grey Logs was the artistic part of my master’s thesis in archaeology. The written part was called Archaeology and the Choreographic Method, where I conceptualized choreography as an archaeological method. Grey Logs is a dance-film and an art-archaeological exploration of Second World War German military occupation sites in Sápmi and the story of dancer Elsa Puolanne (1906–1996), whose troupe performed for German and Austrian soldiers during the summer of 1944. In the absence of archival footage or eyewitness accounts, the film develops an alternative archaeological approach by combining dance, wartime drawings, and material remains to engage with the slowly decaying traces of prisoner-of-war camps. Rather than attempting to reconstruct historical events, the project uses improvisational movement practices to attune performers to the sensory and material presence of the sites, including landscapes, weather, sounds, plants, animals , and other more-than-human actors.