The Kiss and Waste Project
by Anne Lise Stenseth
Norway

Eight video essays portraying the sorrow and hope of the Black Sea towns, in dialogue with social and political contexts. The stories are told through letters written to the artist by women from the Black Sea region, as if she is their mother, sister, girlfriend, or relative.

By using different forms of storytelling - video, photography, sound and text - Anne Lise Stenseth crafts poetic images of luxury and decay, heavy industry and pollution, poverty and desire, extravagance and excess.

Co-producers: Tromsø Kunstforening
Support: Norwegian Arts Council
Duration: 12-20 minutes each video

Culturebase on Anne Lise Stenseth

Identity and migration

The Kiss and Waste Project” is a flexible, growing, changing, site-specific audio/video installation for Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and United Kingdom.

To date the project consists of 8 video essays/portraits made in the the Black Sea countries Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Stenseth has asked women from each country to write letters to her and imagine that they are the artists mother, sister, girlfriend or relative. Stenseth is then using the texts as a manuscript for each video. The letters are read, rehearsed, and interpreted in different ways for the camera.

The interpreters/narrators are local women or female actors and the texts are finally accompanied or contrasted by video material from each country. Stenseth gets in contact with these women by making new connections or through Intercults huge network.

The diverse content of the videos vary from the personal to the political and the main leitmotifs are identity and migration. Reflections and questions about personal struggle, political transition and changes in contemporary Europe.

”Through the process of working with local women and by using a combination of interpretation and representation, fictional and documentary material I try to encounter and reflect upon different aspects of personal, social and public states of being. "The inner and outer space" so to say."
Anne Lise Stenseth

Stenseth explores storytelling

Stenseth explores different ways of storytelling, from the documentary to the fictional often by impressionistic and poetic means. Over the past 10 years she has mainly worked with video portraits/essays, in which the subject of investigation is either person(s), place(s) or both. In addition to video she uses photography, text and sound.

Anne Lise Stenseth lives and works in Oslo and has showed her work in many venues nationally and internationally including Museum Folkwang, Germany, Tent, Rotterdam, Liverpool Biennial and countries like Libanon, Kosovo, Russia, China and Australia.