University of Gothenburg
University of Gothenburg
  2. About
  3. Find staff
  4. Eva La Cour

Eva La Cour

Doctoral Student

The Film, Photography and Literary Composition
Unit
Mail
eva.lacour@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Storgatan 43
41138 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Eva La Cour

 

 

Eva la Cour is a Danish visual artist and researcher with a background in fine arts as well as visual anthropology. She works with audio-visual and spatial forms of montage and display, performance and text, always negotiating with her surroundings. As such her work reflects a general interest in skilled visions, mediation and knowledge formations, which she particularly has investigated in relation to landscapes of authorship and ownership in High Arctic terrains.

At Valand Academy of Art Eva la Cour is a teacher and doctoral candidate with the practice-based artistic research project The Figure of the Guide: Mediating the Open Terrain.

 

More on the research project:

The Figure of the Guide: Mediating the Arctic Terrain is an artistic research project that seeks perspectives on the mediating agency of customary geopolitical, geohistorical and geoaesthetic approaches to the Arctic region, through live-narrated image performance constructions and essayistic film-experiments with collaborative live-editing.

The research uses years of fieldwork material from the High Arctic Archipelago Svalbard. This extraordinary unpeopled place that became peopled in the context of the colonialization of the Arctic, can in many ways can be regarded as a regional anomaly characterized by transient cosmopolitan communities. Nevertheless, Svalbard often functions visually representative. This makes it an interesting place to explore the figure of the guide as a tool to analyze the image-political Arctic, attending especially to the Arctic’s neo-colonial location in the context of environmental crisis. In this sense, the topic of the research hinges in the intersections between environmental histories and their mediation; imaginary geographies and their materialities. It bridges anthropological debates on practice and the construction of knowledge with contemporary discourses on decoloniality and materiality, which allows for modes of inquiring that lack previous research: Through a critical approach to the notion of the essayistic film-experiment, and use of collaborative live-editing, the research brings together questions of 'how to construct an altered sense of historical / contemporary narrative?' with 'how to share authorship and ownership in a live-situation?'. Because, this situates and skills the guide in a context of image production and political economy across artistic and scientific research.

Designed as a consecutive series of film-experiments, the PhD project is a time-space in which a work in progress is repeated and refined. While seeking perspectives on how artistic practices may enable a shift in focus from that of representation to that of mediation, it more generally speculates on the political and aesthetical implications of such a shift.