Olga Ravn: An Enraptured Year by Malene Engelund
Water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was
Toni Morrisson
This week my cloud has unearthed moments of Februaries one, two, three years ago. For the last five days my children have glided past me on my phone in various formations, their many faces slightly chubbier, their hair lighter, their beings taking up other nows. Meanwhile, in my peripheral vision, their present hands have been drawing baobab trees and building dinosaurs, their bodies have been morphing into superheroes.
I won’t be adding to the February collage this year; to commemorate their lives at a time when our family is breaking apart seems to me almost an act of violence. Instead we are planting; the first notions of spinach and gem hearts sprout from plastic containers in primary colours, and each day we examine the transformation of the small bodies positioned in the window sill – from brown kernels to soft green inklings of crisp leaves. We bring water to them in a miniature can that came with the box of seeds and plant pots I bought in Lidl the day after my husband and I ended our relationship.
This morning we discovered a stem that shot up overnight like a mad, exuberant thought. It had risen from the red pot which so far hadn’t produced any seedlings and my sons have named it Mr. Redwood. They are convinced that the long thin body of spinach is only the beginning of an adventurous life and by the time they come home from kindergarten and school this afternoon, they expect a green ladder to stretch from the kitchen into a different kind of cloud – one that holds neither images nor rain, but each and every physical manifestation of their imagination.
My days on the other hand are bound to administrative and every-day tasks – the sale of the flat, the signing of various papers, packed lunches, the laundry, and I find that I’ve been divided in two: I am both a woman performing the three-turn ritual for the folding of a t-shirt, and I am a younger, version of her, one who hasn’t arrived at this point in life, but whose days instead are taken up by less trivial and, she tells herself, grander thoughts.
At present, it feels entirely feasible that my two selves move alongside one another – they don’t seem separated by the before and after of some significant life event, but simply exist in parallel. In certain moments I am able find the point where their threads cross and I can slip from one being into another. It’s an easy transition, one requiring only the open field that is time spent alone – much like when you find you have a free day ahead of you, and jump on a train to another town, leaving a self and a life momentarily behind.
Today is an open field. I’ve taken the boys in, left the spinach to perform its miracles in the windowsill and my hometown of Copenhagen to exercise its own small everyday magic, and have taken the train to Køge, a Danish seaport some 40 kilometres outside the capital.
I arrive and head from the train station to a body of lakes outside town. I’ve come here to follow a small brook called Ellebækken. The brook springs from the lakes and weaves along a small forest-like area before it is lead through a concrete-clad tunnel beneath a heavily trafficked main road. I have to cross the tarmac to rejoin the water as it reappears alongside a treelined dirt-covered pathway. We continue together to a small enclosure. It’s still early and the clear sky has split the morning in two. Here, in the shade beneath the trees exists a now of leaves, bark and branches stunted into white immovability by a layer of frost. Over on the football field sunlight has unlocked another present; an opening of the ground, a damp rising from thawing blades of grass.
I’ve travelled here on the brink of separations; the division of a landscape by shade and sunlight, the coming apart of my marriage, and I’ve followed the water in search of some kind of, not answer, but a sense of source. I need to push against the feeling that we simply follow a thread onto which we string our beads - the carefully chosen, the random, the translucent, the colourful, the heavy metallic ones. I need push against the long straight line of beginning and ending and instead sense that there are crossings, points of transition from one state of being to another.
So far, the brook has led me to a place where frost and sun hold each their own worlds, but here Ellebækken changes from an open body to an underground waterway. It disappears to run a subterranean course and will join Køge River which in turn will lead it into the habour, then the sea. I stand alone among shrubs and fir trees, among recently felled bodies of maples and acorns, and find that I am uncertain how to proceed. I’ve been following the water and now that my companion has disappeared I need to change course.
So I head to the main road and walk towards Køge, heading for my second destination of the day, KØS Museum of Art in Public Spaces, which hosts the exhibition An Enraptured Year by Olga Ravn. The enclosure and museum lie some 750 metres apart, but Ravn has recently been practicing a cancellation of the distance between the two spaces. Over the course of a year, Ravn – who to an English-speaking audience will be best known as the author of the 2021 Booker shortlisted novel The Employees – has from March 2021 to March 2022 been gathering plants and seeds growing by Ellebækken. She has replanted them outside the museum and the seedlings have followed the cycle of their mother plants at the brook, sprouting, flowering, withering, decaying in high beds – unearthing events and memories from Ellebækken in Køge town centre.
An Enraptured Year, however, is not only concerned with the dissolution of distance. The exhibition equally performs an undoing of linearity and insists on the many temporal threads that layer, loop and bind into a finely woven piece of linen. Around Køge, Ellebækken’s seeds have throughout spring sprouted through the loam, its uprooted plants taken hold and grown, not so much magic ladders into the clouds, but rather memories, a past reappearing with each stalk and flowerhead.
Now, here in February, a long, brown, almost leathery stem still stands tall from the high bed, reminding me of Seamus Heaney’s Bog Queen, the woman, and possible human sacrifice, who speaks up through the peat bog of how she ‘lay waiting/ between turf-face and demesne wall/between heathery levels/and glass-toothed stone’.
And there are voices to listen out for. Ellebækken was the presumed gathering site of a group of local women accused of witchcraft in the 17th century and given the collective name of Køge Huskors – The Køge Vixen. During the years 1608–1615, a total of 16 women were convicted, and of these 13 were burned, two committed suicide while one woman escaped. It is the lives and fates of these women that have inspired Ravn’s engagement with the land around Ellebækken and prompted her to dig into and blend the layers of soil and time embedded in the land. This has not only resulted in the repositioning of the life of the brook in the high beds in front of KØS, but also inside the museum. Here Ravn has transformed a space into a curiosity cabinet and I walk through the single room exhibition where see-through linen panels in orange notes hang before the large floor-to-ceiling windows and break, then alter, the sunlight.
Photo: David Stjernholm
While the remnants of Ellebækken’s plants are outside in the high beds, inside their colours have been harvested and framed. Each wall here displays textile samples dyed from flowers and plants collected by the brook throughout the year – a body laying the different lives and intensities of a colour bare. The textiles in various notes of yellow, red, green and black examine the more than human world as it passes through the months, the seasons, the year, and in extension of these, Ravn has also extracted pigments and ink from plants and flowers. These are presented both on paper and as powders and liquids stored in glass jars in an apothecary-style wooden box.
And accompanying the bottled up colours; the memento moris to yellow, green, red, black; the harvests of January, March, June, September, are lyrical texts that seem to burst from the plants themselves. One extract reads, ‘I try to empty a flower of its colour/it took several weeks to empty the flower fully/the yellow continued to serve up from its own name’ [my translation from the Danish].
That flower, and the name of the flower, serving up what seems to be an inexhaustible yellow is where An Enraptured Year dwells – in meetings; between plants alive to themselves and for the purposes and definition we give them; between KØS and Ellebækken; between genres; between times. The work comes into existence in the moments when temporal, geographical, human and more than human threads cross and we are able to transition from one state, one time, one creature into another.
And all of these threads circle the fates of the 16 women who through accusation, torture, trial and conviction were burnt, driven to suicide, or disappeared.
Their outlines– a name, date and cause of death – are noted on a piece of paper in the middle of the exhibition space, though I can’t hear their voices. Those, I sense, would speak nearer the water, so I use mine, and read them out loud
Johanne Tommesis, burned, August 24, 1612
Kirstine Lauridsdatter, burned, September 11, 1612
Mette Banghors, burned, December 7, 1612
Volborg Bødkers, escaped and convicted in absentia, June 7, 1613
Annike Christoffersdatter, burned, June 14, 1613
Anne Olufs, burned, June 26, 1613
Karen Eriks, suicide in prison, August 30, 1613
Maren Muremester, burned, 1613
Maren of Ringsbjerg, burned, 1613
Maren Bysvende, suicide in her well after receiving a summons to appear in court, 1613
Kirsten Væverkvinde, burned, 1613
Birgitte Rokkemager, burned, September 18, 1615
Else Holtug, burned, November 6, 1615
Mette Navns, burned, 1615
Johanne Muremester, burned, 1615
Magdalene, Søren Skrædder’s wife, burned, 1615
After this, there seems to be only silence left. The kind of silence that exists after a terrible rupture. I decide to return to Ellebækken. It is what brought me to KØS, and now the thread seems to pull me back to where it all began, the movement of my body performing a small loop in Ravn’s large tapestry. I repeat the names of the women during the 10-minute walk to the water, and I imagine that they must have passed Ravn’s lips many times during her enraptured year.
Her engagement with the plant life around Ellebækken, through acts of collecting, planting, extracting, and dying throughout the course of a full year, has created an entry point into cyclical time, a means of accessing the women who once gathered at the brook, and Ravn’s performance of her series of repetitive rituals suture her life and their lives together, and invites us to enter this dialogue as well.
Back at the water, I lie down on my stomach and place my hand into the same water that ran here 400 years ago. My palm touches the palm of another woman. I’m not sure who she is, if she comes from the cross point where past meets present, or whether I have found the sense of source I came here to look for – whether I am reaching into another time, or if I am shaking hands with myself.