Seeking an Any Thing from an uncertain time in the ruins of Rejmyre’s future
conceptual product, performance
During a residency period in the Rejmyre Glass Factory in Östergotland, Sweden, Peltz created an object called Any Thing and inserted it into the historical record of the factory and the region. He began the process by dropping the Any Thing into the Hunn lake, at the site of an ice diving excavation conducted by the Rejmyre Historical Society in 2000 that uncovered elements of an historic cable car system that ran through the forest from the glass factory to the nearest railway station. Peltz then waited for the lake to freeze and staged a re-enactment of this earlier ice dive, along with local divers and the members of the historical society, in which they found the Any Thing at this historic site. The project involved an orchestration of divers, members of the historical society, local audiences and media. It cast members of the historical society (who were involved in the first dive) in performing as themselves, within an altered context. The performance was embedded in local news coverage as a story of an archaeological winter expedition.
The Any Thing,
full title:
Any Thing,
made to be lost,
and perhaps later found,
perhaps in early spring,
perhaps when the ice is still thick and clear
is a glass and metal object produced in the Rejmyre Glass factory as part of a guest worker program, of Peltz' design, aimed at experimenting with a model of artistic research through the making of a conceptual product line of and about labour. The Any Thing was his contribution to this product line and contains a clear vinyl recording extracted from a youtube video. The performance engages with two videos: one produced by a couple, on their honeymoon in Myanmar, visiting a group of soon to be unemployed teak logging elephants, and the other produced by the historical society in Rejmyre and exhibited in the Rejmyre Historical Museum, that documents the 2000 ice dive. The Any Thing constitutes an attempt to bring these two complex sites, engaged with moments of labor transformation, into dialogue across temporal and geographic divides.
Press Release text:
On a mild day, in early spring, in the year 2000, a group of people gather on the still frozen Lake Hunn, just a few kilometers east of the Reijmyre Glasbruk in Östergötland, Sweden. The Reijmyre Glasbruk first opened its doors in 1810 and is one of the few remaining sites of refuge for Swedish glass production. The assembled group cuts a hole in the ice, slips into the water and pulls out a series of artifacts buried in the silty bottom of the lake. These included glass products, produced at some uncertain period in the factory’s history, and pieces of a linbanevagn [cable car cart]. The linbana was an early transport system that connected the glass factory town of Rejmyre, located deep in the forest that fueled its furnaces, to the railway station in Simonstorp. At some point in time, this cart went astray and jumped off its rail, falling to the bottom of the lake with its cargo. Recognizing the historic importance of this event, the members of the Rejmyre Historical Society make a short video documenting the proceedings and display the objects they find, and the video they make, in a glass case in the Rejmyre Historical Museum.
On an unusually cold summer day, the American artist Daniel Peltz goes to work at the Reijmyre Glasbruk. he is there as part of a guest-worker program, of his own design, aimed at enlisting a group of artists in ‘thinking labor’ inside the Reijmyre Glass factory, under a particular set of conditions, by making ‘products of and about labor’. In the afternoon, with the assistance of two of the glass workers in the factory, he makes a new product: Any Thing.
The Any Thing, made of glass plates, a steel frame and a clear vinyl recording, finds its way into a display case in the Rejmyre Historical Museum that houses the glass and metal objects discovered during the earlier excavation of the Hunn. After a few months in this state, Peltz takes the Any Thing back to the site on the Hunn, where the other objects in the case had been found, and slips it back into history.
On a mild day in early spring in the year 2017, a group of people gather on the still frozen Lake Hunn outside of Rejmyre, Sweden. They cut a hole in the ice, enter the water and pull out a series of artifacts buried in the silty bottom. One of them is the Any Thing, ready to be opened and played. Over the surface of Lake Hunn, to the forest beyond, the Any Thing releases its sounds [extracted from an eco-tourism video posted to Youtube] of a small herd of now unemployed logging elephants laboring in the teak forests of Burma.
This acoustic call launches the next stage in Peltz' research, a plan to bring a small herd of these unemployed logging elephants from Myanmar to Rejmyre, to think, to imagine and to build a refuge for them in this site of historic refuge.
Peltz offers this performance as a presentation of over a decade of research in Rejmyre, as a way to think the space between a struggling Swedish glass factory/craft tourism site, the small factory town surrounding it that is coming to terms with its new status as a refuge for newly arrived immigrants, his own immigration to the site and the forest and lakes that surround them all.