You Make Me Want To Die In The Country Side
Liv Bugge
Torpedo Press
English
Hardcover
152 pages
110 x 170 mm
2011
ISBN 9788293104032
A meditation on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Liv Bugge Initially published as a three-part series in Blackwood’s Magazine during 1899 before its combined publication in 1902, Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, an Englishman, who accepts a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as captain of a ferry-boat in Africa. It was inspired by Conrad’s own travels up the Congo during the 1880s and, although Conrad does not name the river, it is clear that the story is set in Congo Free State, then the private colony of Belgium’s King Leopold II, and that Marlow has been employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return fellow ivory trader, Kurtz, to civilisation as part of a cover-up. Of thoroughly European descent – his mother being French and his father being English but with a German name – Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region as a charismatic demigod to the tribes surrounding the Inner Station where he keeps his ivory business. He is a man of many talents, an excellent writer and artist with a potential in politics. In his little house in the Inner Station, he keeps a painting he has made of a white woman carrying a torch against an almost black background. During his stay in Africa, he has become corrupt, and the last sentence in his notebook stands as the central statement of Conrad’s tale: “Exterminate all the brutes’”. At the point of Marlow’s meeting with Kurtz, the latter is almost dead from jungle fever (malaria). Marlow takes him down the river, and Kurtz dies on the boat with the words “The Horror, The Horror” ringing in his ears.
(source: https://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=7823&menu=0)
About the Artist
Liv Bugge studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Belgium. She completed her PhD, “The Other Wild: Touching Art as Confrontation”, at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019. Bugge’s research explores how mechanisms in society are internalized and contribute to the maintaining of normative notions and ethics around, for example, such dichotomies as life and non-life or human and nature. Liv has a practice informed by queer and feminist perspectives and was during the period 2012-2020 running the platform FRANK together with artist Sille Storihle.
https://livbugge.com/
(source: https://khio.no/en/staff/liv-bugge)
About the Publisher
Torpedo was founded in 2005, as a non-profit Bookshop and Publisher devoted to the promotion and production of artists’ publications, art theory and critical readers. Torpedo organize discursive activities, exhibitions and events related to the process of publishing. Torpedo is run by Elin Maria Olaussen, Karen Christine Tandberg and Kim Svensson.
https://torpedobok.no/publications
(source: https://torpedobok.no/About-1)
