‘How many people throughout history haven't looked at the horizon in a foreign land and thought about home?’ An interview with Søren Lilholt on his newest exhibition ‘Longing for Home.’

We met with Søren Lilholt, a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen, a former art resident in Sopot. He has studied at Fatamorgana, The Danish School of Art Photography and holds a MA in Visual Culture from The University of Copenhagen. We talk about longing for home, philosophical inspirations, and his exhibition at the Sopot Festival of Photography (Festiwal w Ramach Sopotu). What Søren calls a concentrated intuition, and how does he create the tone of arrangements? Take a read to find out.

Monika Juskowiak: Thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions. Can you briefly tell us about your cooperation with the Sopot Festival of Photography? How did it start?

Søren Lilholt: In march I received an invitation from curator Maja Kaszkur to be one of the three residents at Festiwal Fotografii w Ramach Sopotu. She introduced me to the festival and asked if I would be able to come to Sopot for approximately 10 days and create new work that would later be shown at the 8^th edition of the festival. I was very honored to be invited and naturally accepted the invitation. Since then, I’ve worked closely with Maja and many people from the festival. It has been an incredible cooperation, and I am thankful for all the people who put in so much effort to make it a success. 

MJ: Can you give us a sneak peek of your exhibition at the Festival – it is called ‘Homesickness.’ The project includes archival photographs from the collections of the Museum of Sopot. Can you tell us more about it, and what the viewers can experience?

SL: Actually I much prefer the Polish title (which is the primary title of the work): ‘Tęsknota za Domem,’ because it introduces an element of longing instead of the word sickness. To be sick is so closely tied to something detrimental, while longing maintains an element of reconciliation, so the more correct translation would be ‘Longing for Home.’

The exhibition contains four different photographic elements. It consists of photographs I’ve produced while walking endlessly for hours and hours in and around Sopot during the ten days of the residency. These images were created through what I like to call a concentrated intuition. Following quite extensive research into the topic of homesickness I let this knowledge fall into the background and let perception, intuition and emotion guide the photographic exploration. A sort of extended thinking on the subject through vision. The photographic walks also functioned as an act of making the foreign take home within me. 

I knew I also wanted to include images from and created by people who lived their lives in Sopot. 

MJ: What is it in the images from the Museum of Sopot that makes them so interesting for you?

SL: These images were taken by people who were once at home in the place I was currently not. Not knowing exactly what I was looking for, the Museum of Sopot kindly let me look through almost their entire collection of images. I collected those that made an immediate impression on me – images that somehow touched emotionally, symbolically, or figuratively upon the theme of homesickness. Some of these are shown in full, and in others I’ve focused on certain details. I also found a quite large collection of postcards from the city spanning a time of nearly 100 years. Almost all of them had the same motif of the famous pier in Sopot stretching into the sea towards the horizon. Looking at these made me think of that eternal, unchanging horizon as a sort of archetypal image of homesickness. How many people throughout history haven’t looked at the horizon in a foreign land and thought about home? 

MJ: There is something about postcards, it’s a kind of medium between the ‘longer’ and the place they are longing for… Quite magical. How did you work with this collection of postcards in your exhibition? 

SL: I cropped out a small part of the horizon from 29 of these postcards and installed them in six frames in a single long line. The colours, textures, and ratio between image and sea are unique to each image and so the images jump up and down in the frames, but the horizon remains in the same position throughout the line. The horizon hangs alone on one wall as a sort of anchor point for the exhibition. It is both a very specific horizon – the horizon which encompasses the place in which the work was made – but at the same time it is a sort of universal horizon which points to the broader aspects of the thematic subject. 

MJ: That’s quite a sneak peek! The exhibits are the images from the Museum of Sopot, the postcards installation, and the series of photographs you created while walking around Sopot. Are there any other pieces that make up the exhibition’s space? 

SL: Yes. I made a series of polaroids from various locations in Sopot in which I placed a large white arrow that I carried with me, pointing in the direction of my home. While the arrow, in reality, was continuously pointing in the same geographical direction, the experience of the reality of the images shows an arrow pointing in all directions because of the different placements from which the photographs were taken. 

Apart from the horizon that hangs alone on one wall, the polaroids and other images are placed on three opposite walls and vary greatly in size from very small and unframed to quite big and framed. On these walls, the images move very freely and poetically. There is no apparent narrative, but the images are placed in ways that invite the viewer to find symbolic, emotional, thematic, or formal connections. I devote a lot of time to arranging these walls and nothing is placed without great consideration. When arranging I strive to create a constellation of images that vibrates in a certain way – almost like a piece of music. I want the images and their arrangement to set the tone, to create a space for reflection that invites the viewer to invest their own emotions, experiences, and knowledge into the interpretations of the exhibition. 

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MJ: I read that your artworks are deeply rooted in a phenomenological approach to photography and visuality. What makes phenomenology so attractive and intellectually compelling to you, and why do you define it visually? 

SL: I’ve never had an ambition of defining phenomenology with photography. Rather I’ve always thought of photography as a way to do a sort of phenomenologically inspired visual poetry. What I mean is that I don’t set out to illustrate philosophical thought. Rather, I expand or work through inspirations from philosophy to ask some of the same questions. I try to grasp, explore, consider or simply ask what it is to be longing for home, for instance, through visuality. 

I don’t use photography as a way of documenting the world. I don’t photograph situations, people, places, etc. to document that they exist or that some particular event took place. I use photography as a way of seeing more of the world. As a way of opening the world to vision and vision to the world. To me, the magical thing with photographs is that despite their emblematic character – you will often feel that there is ‘something’ that displaces itself from the direct imprint of the image. A lot of my work tries to dwell on this. On that which somehow escapes the fixation of the image, because I think it is in this ‘displacement’ that we get in touch with what it is to be a sentient body in a world of other sentient bodies/things/objects. 

MJ: Why is the yearning for home so prominent in your photography? What does longing for home mean for you?

SL: I had several ideas as to what I wanted to do while in residency but wasn’t sure if it was the time and place for those projects, so I asked myself a very simple question: ‘What did I expect to be the most insistent sensation while being away?’ I immediately knew it would be that longing for the home since the journey would be the first time I was away from my son for a longer time. I then started researching and found that the phenomenon of homesickness has both a quite interesting history (up until the 19th century it was considered a quite serious medical condition that people died from) and that it in a broader sense was closely related to the way I work with and think about photography. 

While researching I came across a quote by the German romanticist poet, writer, and philosopher Novalis stating: ‘Philosophy is really homesickness. An urge to be at home everywhere.’ It’s a thought that has since been picked up by several thinkers, but to put it simply it implies that all human endeavors to understand the world, primordially stem from a longing to feel at home in the world by apprehending all aspects of our place and being in it. This is of course an endless longing. You could say that everything we do in life is striving toward finding that which makes us dwell and feel at home in the world. This made a lot of sense to me in the way I work with photography as I generally think of it as a way of opening the world through vision, getting closer to it, to dwell on its innumerable constellations. Like the philosopher, I feel that any photographer and any photograph is reaching towards making the world take home within us through the image. 

MJ: How do you think the feeling of longing and homesickness is presented in the modern world?

SL: In a broader and contemporary view, I think the question of homesickness is quite relevant. Firstly, in regards to the unbearable and heartbreaking situation for so many people all around the world who have been both physically and existentially driven from their homes. Secondly, in regards to the increasing globalization and the possibility for us/the demand of us to be electronically present nearly everywhere at once. This is beneficial in so many ways, but I think it may also have pushed many into an unconscious state of homesickness. This can be outlined through a conundrum inherent in Novalis’ quote if we imagine that the urge to be everywhere at home was somehow fulfilled: If your home is everywhere – then there’s nothing that differentiates that which is home from that which isn’t home and suddenly we find ourselves in a state of homelessness and with renewed irreconcilable feelings of homesickness. Ultimately, I think this can lead to an existential condition of anxiety. 

It struck me while working on the project in Sopot, that a lot of the images I made and also a lot of the images I collected from the Museum of Sopot had a certain aura of uncanniness to them. In psychoanalysis the notion of the ‘Unheimlich’ is closely linked to the phenomenon of home. Unfortunately the word loses a lot of its meaning in the English translation to the Uncanny since the German ‘heimlich’ means both ‘secret’ but also ‘homely.’ So the unheimlich/uncanny is that which is ‘not homely.’ When faced with that which is existentially unhomely we become anxious.

In thinking and contemplating on homesickness as a phenomenon, while working in a very intuitive photographic way that was also influenced by actual emotions of homesickness, I thought it made sense that the images somehow turned out to reach into the uncanny or unheimlich, and I’ve tried to keep this sensation as a looming presence in the exhibition. 

MJ: In your art, you are using photography as a tool of cognition, a medium that allows empirically study the world surrounding us. But isn’t photography a medium that helps us view the world as an abstract, expanding reality, defining it in a new/different form? 

SL: I don’t think that I have ever thought of photography as placed strictly within empiricism. As mentioned earlier I think photography has a unique quality of being able to make the world, our experiences, etc. take home within us through its visuality, not only as a means of documentation but also as a creative opening towards the world. For instance: Why have we all at some point taken an image of a beautiful sunset on the horizon? We all know that the image won’t do justice to the actual experience of the sunset. But we still take the photograph. Sure there is an aspect of wanting to remember. But isn’t it also a sort of grasping for that which somehow escapes the image? An attempt to make the experience situate itself within us – not only as a memory – but also as an opening towards the experienced? Creating images is a generative behavior – because photographs at one and the same time originates from and creates our world. They offer themselves to vision and in this offering they also inform future vision. They are never static or fixed but ever expanding, recontextualizing, fading away or reemerging. ‘We don’t look at an image – rather we see with it’, as Merleau-Ponty writes in ‘L’œil et l’Esprit.’ 

MJ: To wrap up, what would you recommend to artists going abroad for an art residency?

SL: To have a general idea of what you would like to work with and what you would require to do it, but remember to leave room for the work to take its form and be developed while there. A dear fellow artist once gave me a short advisory creed that I hereby will pass along: Inspiration follows action. 

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Søren Lilholt

Homesickness

2-18.09.2022

Place: Państwowa Galeria Sztuki w Sopocie (PGS)

Sopot Festival of Photography

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