Surt's Diaries

Animated installation

​3-minute loop
Stop-motion, hand-drawn, paint on glass, cutout, collage, clay animation, sand animation, mixed media

 

Developed through the Master's degree program at Konstfack, Stockholm, 2013–2014.

Presented as an installation at the graduation exhibition.

 

When you open the pages of Norse mythology, Surt is the first being to appear — standing at the edge of the void before the world began, a witness to everything that followed. Surt's Diaries imagines the memories of creation as he might have recorded them, and invites us to glimpse his account. In the installation space, a large, long fabric scroll — his diary — lies unrolled across the floor, and upon it, memories of the world's beginning emerge as animation. The imagery is reconstructed from natural materials gathered from the Swedish landscape — flowers, fabric, clay, sand — composed through collage stop-motion animation and sound.

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Behind the work lies an interest in oral tradition as a form of transmission. Unlike written text, oral stories never settle into a fixed form. They are reshaped by the sensibility and imagination of each person who receives them, and transformed again through the voice of each new teller. They shift freely, yet something ancient and shared survives — much like nature itself, endlessly changing while carrying its essence forward. The making of this work follows the same principle. Just as mythology is retold through the materials of each time and place, this animation is composed from elements that carry their own cycles of growth and decay. The beginning of the world finds its form once more through the particular visual and sonic presence of these materials.