◎ Through the Blind Spot  ◎

by Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, MDI Ensemble 

ore 18.00 > Through the Blind Spot 
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ore 19.30 > Through the Blind Spot 
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ore 21.00 > Through the Blind Spot 
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The blind spot in the eye is the part of the retina where there are no photoreceptors, meaning one eye actually can’t see an object placed in the blind spot. What’s even more amazing is that you don’t notice because your creative brain fills in what’s lacking with color and texture from the area surrounding this blind spot. One can very well imagine that we lack out on or even misread what we think is reality. 

As the true act of adventure in nature, music and performative art has to be experienced; Art is in continuous communication with it’s surroundings – to me the act of performing music is all about communication, with the space, with the time, with the people involved on three levels: 1. between the stage and audience, 2. between the performers/creators and 3. within yourself in constant dialogue with your own history, your creativity and the subconscious with all its learned or innate desires, objects of interest etc. What is real is what is created in the minds of each person involved. 

This gives an intriguing challenge: How to artistically make a reflection on musical communication where distance given by technology plays a role, - a highly relevant question and creative obstacle in the times of lock-down. I want to explore the concert situation in dialogue with some of my written music from the past and make new connections to be shared and exhibited only once, for those present in Bolzano. Perhaps ending up never really connected, rather showing a unification of two parallelle platforms, both sharing, but not accurately both time and space. The actual distance from Oslo to Bolzano - it’s after all the same earth that carries us all - is present in us by knowledge alone, and carried in our bodies after experiencing travels and walking real ground. Being a lover of hikes in mountains and nature, and valuing the physically shared moment of playing and listening to music created now and in real life more than any other art form, makes a concert situation like this an opposition to my ideals for an optimal musical experience and challenges the responsibility for sharing an optimal product with an audience. As Alice walks ‘through the looking glass’, she seeks to explore a parallelle world with it’s own unrealistic rules. A challenge and inspiration. 

Maja S. K. Ratkje, Svartskog, July 2020