Vi beskytter landet

"Ja vi elsker dette landet" ("Yes, we love this country" is the first line of the Norwegian national anthem) sings the 90 year-old Rudolf Geiss with tears in his eyes. He was one of the German soldiers who had occupied Norway under the 2nd World War. And yet he fell in love with the country, as he says today.

The documentary lecture performance VI BESKYTTER LANDET takes a look at mutual war memories. Created for touring in high schools it creates an intricate retrospect on the relationships between German soldiers and Norwegian women during the occupation. Formally it fluctuates between sober lecturing and poetical abstractions of intimacy: Historical objet trouvés, original soundclips, live-projected images, archive texts and interviews meet with the performers? bodies, reminding of the physical aspect in the German-Norwegian relationships. The different medias are sometimes unison, and sometimes disharmonious, but always with the purpose of transmitting history as something tactile. Something touchable. A lost object. A retrieved person. Somehow, this is also the history of history. Or perhaps a journey through the desolate landscape between humans and the very own history it has shaped.