Stonesetting and the White Raven

Stonesetting and the White Raven, 2025

Installation, sound.

Stonesetting and the White Raven is an installationwith sound. The work is based on a soul journey and a ritual ceremony with the ancestor spirits on the land in Greenland. 

The Invisible (in)Existence, 2015, Performance, installation, sound. Gråmølna, Trondheim Artmuseum. Foto: Inger Magrethe Hove Laustsen,

Transcription of sound from the installation:

"I walk up a mountainside with Piittaaqqiinaaq. I am not well; my body and soul are sick. She lays me down on the mountainside between the stones. I lie still. My eyes are closed. Then she takes stones from the ground and arranges them all the way around my body.

I can feel the sacred old ritual she is tying around me. With her hands, she gently washes my forehead, my cheeks, my face. She holds her hands carefully around my head. Then I rise into the air. I no longer have my body with me. A white raven flies ahead of me up and up and up. Into the clouds. It turns completely white, and I only see white as we move upwards. Then I see a dimly lit landscape in front of me, a mountain valley. We fly into it, and here stand white figures. They welcome me. They have been waiting for me. A man steps forward and places a thin seal skin band around my shoulders. As I receive it, I feel its sacred power. Then he says, “Come back. There is more we must teach me.” Then I am called back again and travel down through the white sky, down into my body in the stone setting where I lie on the ground. I see piittaaqqiinaaq sitting and waiting for me.

I lie down on the ground, the dragon/raven flies towards me and climbs up onto my chest. With its raven claws, it tears open my chest and crawls into my body. As the black body disappears into my chest, I suddenly open up completely. The inside is turned out. I am completely black inside. Black as the being.

Heather begins to grow up through my body. Large purple heather plants grow out of my chest. I feel Pittaaqqiinnaaq is with me. My spirit rises from the body. Next to the body, I see how it rots and weathers over time, and only the bones remain. I look at the skeleton head and the bones. I stand there in the middle of the enormous landscape, while my skeleton lies on the ground. I feel an infinity and silence. In my hand, I have the black staff from Pittaaqqiinnaaq. My amulet. Then I start to walk down the stony hillside together with Pittaaqqiinnaaq. I take some small stones and hold them in my hand, feeling their physical roughness in my hand before placing them back on the stony mountainside.

We walk up a river. She shows me how grand it is. I feel how I am in this enormous landscape. She says to me, “Let the rivers be veins in your body.” I feel and see how my veins are like the water that runs in the large plain valleys with sand after the glaciers have retreated.

Then I am next to the skeleton again. I am called back. I ask how I am to get back when I no longer have a body to travel back with. Pittaaqqiinnaaq lays a seal skin on the ground and collects all my bones, places them in it, and ties it together into a lump. Then she throws it over the cliff where we are standing. It falls into the sea, far below us. I see a seal come out of the water. My bones and skin have become a creature of their own. It swims in the sea from Greenland to Norway, where I live. It shows me back. She shows me a ritual so that I can call on the power that connects me. The connection through the sea, through the seal. The sea and the land beneath the sea. It's all one. There is no separation."