Live and Let Die;
Sovereignties or territorial organization
Performance with Leander Djønne at the Swedish Institute in Paris, 2010.

The performance was a part of the inauguration of Leander Djønne´s large scale sculpture in the backyard of the Swedish Institute in Paris.

The installation was a reconstruction of the carcass or shipwreck of a Dano-Norwegian slave trade frigate, the Fredensborg from 1768, found outside the east coast of Norway in 1974.  The installation is made from pieces of old used wood found in the suburbs of Paris. Most of the wood was found in aerias where the impoverished Romani people used to live.  In 2009, more than 10,000 Romani people were sent back to Romania and Bulgaria as part of a huge deportation program ran by the french authoreties with Sarkozy as a captain...

the speech:

(Long silence)
The Wreck Fredensborg’s inauguration is an event that's about as close to a royal coronation as today’s emerging empire is. This is a day filled with ceremony, salutes, parades, speeches, and a great party and, of course, symbolism: of new beginnings, rites of passage, of change.

This should guide our attention towards the transcendental principles and values that might guide our lives and ground our political action.
The name of the act and artwork is:
Live and Let Die; Sovereignties or territorial organization.
Even if we’re nihilists by nature, we are destined to live in this world not only subject to its power of domination but also contaminated by its corruption.

I therefore on behalf of the Norwegian ministry of foreign affairs, the Norwegian ministry of culture and His Majesty king Harald the V, declare, - through this symbolic act of purification and redemption, a moral obligation that should be established and through this a greater power of knowledge production will conquer.
To conclude with a personal note:

This has been a painful speech to write, and if I have done any justice to the subject matter of this project, it will be a painful piece of artwork to comprehend. There is no way around this, nor should there be.

I offer this speech with the greatest reverence for those who suffered almost unthinkable violence, terror, and death, in the firm belief that we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism.

 My last words:
Truth must be not only proclaimed but also acted.



by Leander Djønne