A Piano is Too Heavy to Carry is a collaboration between artist Sophia Ioannou Gjerding and composer Nina Møller. The work intertwines narratives about human bodies, the bodies of instruments and nature in a speculative future scenario. It depicts a vision of a future hunter-gatherer society, where a mixture of prehistoric objects and post-apocalyptic speculations give shape to the black holes in history and nourish thoughts about an imaginary future.
The protagonist of the film is the gatherer: a cyborg-like hybrid of organism and machine, reality and fantasy, past and future. The gatherer does not feed on triumph or defeat, but on repetition, on the circular and the continuous activity of hauling as essential to life. As a counternarrative to the hunter’s brave exploits, the gatherer represents the eternal hauling-home-of-stuff as part of our history, but also makes clear that the gathering of all the artefacts underpinning our worldview is both selective and subjective.
The film revolves around the writing of stories and of history, and how stories about the future are shaped by stories about the past, which are in turn influenced by our own time and space.
Sophia Ioannou Gjerding is a visual artist, educated at The Jutland Art Academy in Denmark. Through research-driven works that draw on popular culture, critical theory, as well as historical sources, she examines how image production affects us both culturally and politically. A key element in her work is a study of the discourses that exist in new image technology such as CGI (computer generated imagery), when the production of virtual worlds in movies and computer games creates a new discourse of objectivity.
Nina Møller is a composer, educated at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark. Inspired by cut-up and classical music, she creates changeable collage landscapes, which she repeatedly destroys and then builds a new one. The sound is dramatic and dark and on the verge of opacity. She uses vocal manipulations to compliment machine sounds and acoustic instruments.