Mitt Uthus

CHRISTINA SPORRONG

I grew up in Sweden and spent many Summers in the good company of my grandparents out in the countryside. We had a small red summer house, no running water and an outhouse. My grandfather had a wood shop in the basement for fixing things on the house and working the land. I spent most days in there, tinkering and learning to work with tools.

The outhouse was a small room, plastered with pictures, mismatched wallpaper and newspaper articles of the times. I remember having favourite pictures, and areas of the walls that seemed never to lose their intrigue.

My sense of the world was shaped by the walls of that outhouse, it was a time capsule that gave me a point of reference, the pictures etched into my memory forever.

You are now sitting in my reinterpretation of this experience as the world is today.

I often wonder at the complex ideas and impactful events are condensed into a single iconic image. A meme.

The impact of a meme is the result of the precise alchemic reduction of an idea or event, that becomes so universal it is able to self-replicate and withstand time. It’s recorded in our memory and becomes the one image we can evoke when thinking of the incident. It’s universal and cross-cultural and becomes a collective memory.

Just as sitting in my outhouse staring at the pictures on the walls mirrored the world of the past, I hope Mitt Uthus can echo some of the current collective human experiences that shape us today.

I would like to contrast the beauty and simplicity of an outhouse with the images that mirror our complex tech-oriented world today.

Maybe in this slightly absurd and juxtaposed setting, one can get closer to the fundamental law of nature that everything is indeed impermanent, and can see that everything is ingested and excreted in a never-ending cycle.

The public is invited to sit in seclusion in Mitt Uthus and contemplate memes.

There’s somethin’ happenin’ here… Click to watch and listen.

Mitt Uthus exposes our current moment in time through the lens of digital media culture and contemporary news. I have carefully curated socio-political memes on the walls of this outhouse, inviting an exploration into contemporary viral media and the power wielded by these iconic visual sound bites of our culture.