Friends He Lost At Sea 

Date: 2009
Length: 05:36 min.
Format:  16:9
Specification: Colour, Sound

The opening of this video introduces a man in a museum, who is sitting, contemplating a collection of paintings by Michael Ancher, a Danish artist known for his realistic portrayals of the fishermen from port of Skagen. Suddenly, the camera switches from the representation of a museum scene to the portrayal of the man's memory. As if being planted into his brain, the camera projects the man's vision of two of Ancher's paintings coming alive. In a tableau vivant, the viewer sees a representation of Ancher's Will He Round the Point? (1879) and the Crew is Saved (1894).
The man's vision features one notable difference from the Dutch original: in the place of the heroic Danish fishermen, the man envisages people of various ethnic backgrounds staring pensively into the vastness of the sea or being rescued from a shipwreck. The man's inner monologue, filtered through the female narrator's voice, reveals the man's trauma of dislocation and of isolation from those he holds dear. However, by the substitution of the Danish fishermen for a group of mixed ethnicities, the friends that the man lost at sea come to be understood metaphorically as refugees lost to emigration. Thus Jørgensen 's video serves as a springboard for considering the issues of escape and survival, of intimacy and the rupture of personal connections triggered by social mobility and dislocation.

OC