Magnus Bärtås | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

You Told Me. Three words and two people are involved. You is not a complete stranger, since Me is addressing You in the past tense. A continuation is also implied; you told me something. This something may be a story, or it may be a fact.

This dissertation in artistic research is grounded in the You Told Me situation and certain resonances of the act and context of utterance. Fundamental to the work are meetings, conversations and storytelling – activities that are closely linked to the biographical genre, but also to the oral dissemination of artworks. Work story is a concept that points to the stories about the making of art, the very sequence of actions that inform the work, and the order of the actions within the sequence – practically, symbolically, ethically, metonymically, metaphorically...

You Told Me is also about the making of video essays – about listening and talking to images, and making transferences between the working instances of narrative video. Video essays, like work stories, do not just give an account of their own orbit of production, but they also reflect on their own choices of method and subject matter as well as their own contingent nature. The video essays and work stories in this book privilege the meaning of the local, the situated, the neglected detail, the personal pronoun, the individual’s body and its experience of pleasure and pain, and the striking repetition among people and in history. These singularities, and their mundane and fantastic stories, are formed by, inscribed in – and producing – our social and political realms. You Told Me – work stories and video essays/ verkberättelser och videoessäer.