Etta Säfve’s practice spreads over 8 mm film/video, drawing, photography, artist writings and installations.
The works can be seen as separate parts of a larger whole in which images, thoughts and themes overlap and forms on-going series in continuous dialogue with each other. Like letters in an alphabet, individual pieces and elements are often re-used and fragments or larger components transform, transmits and reappear in several works.
The works spring from a strong interest in the human relation to nature, in how reality (“the real” ) and representation are experienced, how we relate to time (the now) and to place (presence), to the temporary and the sustainable in a contemporary society.
In the working process literature is an important source, as are phenomena’s such as cloud seeding, globalization, media fixation and alterations in nature.
– A cloud is seeded with chemicals to make it rain or snow at a certain moment. This and other such matters forms starting points.
The works are often made with the presence of the making left visible in them – the shaking of the hand in an 8mm film sequences, the mistakes in a drawings still visible in layers under the final image and so on. The media and material are carefully chosen in order to correspond with the ideas behind the works. A wall drawings that only exists for a short period of time, a porcelain book in which the material will last for a very long time with quotes on disappearance, slide projections and 8 mm films presented on thin transparent papers that at the same time lets the work be both present and transitional as an object in a room.
The works attempts to seek out the in-between moments and the gaps – between man and nature, between map and territory, between longing and belonging, between the transitory and the permanent, between magic and deconstruction.