Cally Spooner Selects
Jesper List Thomsen, Blackbirds, 2018

Audio recording of live reading at Hot Wheels Project, Athens, April 2019
9 min 41 sec [extract]
Courtesy of the artist and Hot Wheels Athens

Cally Spooner
October 2021

The Roberts Institute of Art asked me to propose an artist and their work to the On Screen Specials programme. The brief was someone with whom I had a relationship based in mutual support and so I immediately thought of Jesper. At the outset it’s good to disclaim; Jesper List Thomsen is an artist I’m extremely close to but even before meeting him in person a decade ago I had met his work, which captivated me as it wrangled with language, voice, the pictorial and bodily impact of writing.

Another disclaimer: Blackbirds is not a film. Perhaps we could describe it as a long form poem but I think Jesper would prefer to call it a text. Blackbirds — like many of Jesper’s texts — travels through an unforgiving terrain, in this case a densely populated landscape in which moving and still images, public figures and flattened desires circulate in back-flashes and feedback loops. In response, and in resistance, Jesper opens a semantic dimension for the body — and its language.

Structurally, Blackbirds is rooted in Danish, written in English. It is composed to be embodied, read aloud in a meeting of corporeal, fleshy and sonic matter. Blackbirds is then a form: poetic, equally discursive — that arrives from a desire to strip composition back, move in unlikely directions, become dematerialised and less detectable, in order to remain abundantly, unshakably embodied. By collapsing and editing experience and language into a sparse baseness, a space is cleared. In that space something unexpectedly complex unfolds.

Over the last two-years so much life turned into flat, hyperactive imagery. Blackbirds’ simple form, sporadic absurdity, and literary multidimensionality is why I wanted to propose this work; as an alternative means of moving the body through visual, digital culture.