Epitaph for Sonja 1: Body/Archive/Movement combines archival footage of young Swedish women performing tightly-synchronized gymnastic routines in Rolf Husberg’s 1946 tourist film, The Sofia Girls, Rhythmic Gymnastics in Sweden, with footage of my own moving body into a personal mediascape. A system of exercise therapy and physical training, Swedish gymnastics was developed by Pehr Henrik Ling in the early 1800s, initially for military application. Innovator Elin Falk adapted it for her female students in the early 1900s, but it was through the efforts of pedagogue Maria (Maja) Carlquist that Swedish gymnastics would become known around the world as a system of classically inspired, relaxed, rhythmical movements performed without music. Carlquist’s students represented Sweden’s national gymnastics program at the 1939 World Fair in the US, but became a cause celebre after performing as part of a 600-person exhibition for the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin after which Carlquist founded Sofiaflickorna (The Sofia Girls). In the 1940s, the troupe traveled widely and Carlquist’s research and guidebooks circulated in translation. Although I haven’t been able to confirm it officially, representations of The Sofia Girls likely also circulated in Olympia 2. Teil – Fest der Schönheit (The Festival of Beauty), part two of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), providing a sense of how these performing bodies were inevitably enmeshed in discourses of Nordic whiteness, health, femininity, and the Swedish nation.
Epitaph for Sonja 1 is the first in a series of videographic studies related to a research project titled “Orphan Films, Archive Bodies,” about the film collection of the former Nordic Heritage Museum (NHM), where I first encountered The Sofia Girls. “Orphan Films, Archive Bodies” considers how this local heritage film archive, now digitized and housed as part of the Moving Image Collection at the University of Washington, negotiates national identity, local community, collective memory, and knowledge. A heterotopic entity in its own right, the collection of approximately 85 orphaned films of unknown provenance includes touristic “visit Scandinavia” films, home-movie travelogues, SAS airline promotional films, shorts featuring Nordic-American cultural events, and numerous fish processing films. The collection is at once a product of Nordic-American imaginings and institutions and also something quite haphazard; it came to exist in the absence of a clear collection logic. “Orphan Films, Archive Bodies” strives to facilitate conversations between heritage communities, museums, and the university about the complexities of Nordic-American (film) heritage.
Epitaph for Sonja 1 enlists the personal mediascape to explore my ambivalent feelings toward the Sofia Girls. The study tempers the reified beauty and athleticism of these young women performing in the open landscape of northern Sweden with footage of my own, middle-aged body, feet planted firmly in front of a bathroom mirror. In this space, my torso and arms sway rhythmically, releasing, collapsing, and then resolving again in unrehearsed movements, captured without music or costuming. This footage also reflects my experience of the summer 2023 Embodying the Video Essay Workshop at Bowdoin College, where I took it. Intense periods of creative, collective attention to embodiment and hours seated at the computer each fueled my will to archive, to dance. I’m curious about how my untrained and unhinged body, framed by this delimited interior space, distorts the youthful virility presented in this archival footage. There are other rhythms moving me to recontextualize these captivating and unsettling images. In this auto-ethnographic experiment, my body strives to make sense of archive and to be somehow archival.
In keeping with the paradoxes of the archive broadly conceived, the bodies animating Epitaph for Sonja 1 are at once young and old, dead and alive, present and absent. These images belong to the historical past, yet take on new life as I touch them or manipulate them videographically. André Lepecki’s consideration of what he calls “the will to archive,” along with his statement “the body is archive and the archive a body”—both gleaned from his 2010 essay, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances”—offer intriguing provocations. Epitaph for Sonja 1 reflects something like a will to reenact; it explores dance as afterlife. In his essay, Lepecki elucidates a trend in experimental choreography in which practitioners return to earlier choreographies, re-enacting them in the name of the contemporary. This work, which “tracks and steps and bodies and gestures and sweat and images and words and sounds performed by past dancers” recognizes a source of inexhaustible creative potential or fields.1 Borrowing a phrase from Brian Massumi, Lepecki refers to these creative fields as “impalpable possibilities” that are to be found, presumably, in any past work. The “will to archive” names the activation of these impalpable possibilities through re-enactment.
I read Lepecki’s essay as an invitation to find new forms of creativity within archival ambivalence. Similarly, Johannes Binotto and Evelyn Kreutzer invite practitioners to re imagine their relationship to audiovisual materials. In A Manifesto for Videographic Vulnerability, they write, “Let’s not only use audiovisual sources to analyze, question, and problematize the material itself, but let’s also use (misuse? abuse? re-use? appropriate?) them to think about/through/with our lives, cultures, societies at large.” In its study of body/archive/movement, Epitaph for Sonja 1 foregrounds moments of vulnerability to convey a deep, pervasive desire for connection. The personal mediascape emerges as one potential model for integrating care as we use audiovisual sources to think through lived experience, past and present.
: :
Endnotes
- André Lepecki, “The Body as Archive: Will to Re-Enact and the Afterlives of Dances,” Dance Research Journal 42, no. 2 (2010): 29.
Amanda Doxtater