And when it came to selecting or creating the video and pieces of sound that make up Bercy Bus station. How did you go about choosing the components that make up the piece?

Pernille: That was a long process. I think we started with me making huge files of video put together that I sent to Nanna, and then we talked about which one she could hear sound to, and a lot about which video clips worked well together. Because there is this sense that they should fit together, but you should also be surprised, so there should always be something that doesn’t work between the two video clips, so it’s not too smooth. So there is always something maybe going a little bit against what you’d expect of the next thing. 

It seems like it was an incredibly collaborate process. Could you talk about what were some of the challenges you faced in bringing together the different elements of the piece?

Nanna: I had some challenges with coming up with the mood of the music. In the beginning, I was thinking a lot about how the music directs the interpretation of the video. I found it difficult to basically do anything, because I felt like that it would instantly become something loaded with meaning and interpretation, and I wanted to keep the interpretation open. And just like Pernille said it shouldn’t be smooth all the time. That was a challenge  for me in the beginning, because I felt music does that. It puts meaning to a picture.

Pernille: Yeah, meaning or do you mean maybe feeling?

Nanna: Yeah, feeling. Yeah both meaning and feeling. Like a mood you should be in. And I wanted to avoid that. But that was also an interesting challenge. It forced me to think about how the music can be open. And something that I came up was using silence as a musical element. Many of the pictures in the video have a lot of sound, I feel like in themselves. Visually. A lot of noise in my ears at least. All of these obstacles, it became an interesting process for me.

Pernille: For me an obstacle was that I started out with the video, which in itself is very you could say poetic. Because it doesn’t have a clear meaning. It’s in some way abstract. It is made up of different elements put together, more than a sequence that makes sense. And so I started coming up with a poem that I put over the video, and it didn’t work at all because then you then had poetry on poetry. And it was a mix of two abstract noise in a way. So going from that to realising, that I needed to write something very concrete. And I came up with this story of a woman doing a bus journey. The inspiration behind it was one day I was going to pick up my friend in a bus station in Paris, and I arrived in Bercy Bus Station, which I’d never been in before. It was a bright sunny day, and then you go into this building, which is like a cave with a lot of neon signs. The lighting was so different and the people on the outside were walking and were going somewhere. The people on the inside were sitting there waiting, and they were in this very special place that you are when you wait. Like this in between time, that is useless. And what do you do with yourself in this position and what do you think about in this position. And that interested me so much. And from there, I found this urban planner called Kevin Lynch that wrote a book called ‘’The View from the Road’’ where he aestheticizes the highway experience. And I tried to use that, but then I found out you can’t use too much aesthetics on aesthetics. There needs to be some concrete material – a concrete story. And if not we should just get rid of the text and just do like poetic video with music. That would work, but the third element of poetry would be floating away. 

Time as a concept is an important part of this piece. How would you say it is expressed in this piece visually and sonically?

Nanna: I feel like sonically it has two modes of time in the music. There is this sense of flow and there is this sense of the abruptive time. That I worked with. So there are moments where the music is very fragmented – like abruptive and always trying to start, but never really managing to become something before it dissolves into nothing. And there are other times when there’s like either flow or like a noise that flows throughout the scenes. Like concrete, it works with loop and repetition in the music, so I feel like that is a place where the music and the video mix together because the video does the same thing. Like it manipulates the time.

Pernille: So obviously, we worked with the same themes here. So for me a lot of flow and abruptive. For me very concrete water flowing for example. And I think form or melody wise – the technique for filming it is very much me standing very still with the camera, and watching things go by. So it has this slowness of real life, or like real time expanding itself. You see how you have to go into the picture and accept that this is as slow as real time is moving. And also, as Nanna said, I work a little bit with manipulation, so sometimes the time goes even a little bit backwards, which is sometimes a feeling you can have when you’re waiting on a long journey. Like time doesn’t move as it should or as it usually does. It goes very slowly. There are some shots of the waiting room of this Bercy Bus Station. And another part is a lot of driving you see the highway going past trees, and these two different modes of motion also speaks to me about time. Because you have the waiting and the moving through, but while you’re moving through in the space in the car, you also sit in the car in the same kind of waiting position. It’s just the outside that is different.

Were you thinking road trip movies of some kind?

Nanna: Oh yes.

Pernille: In the beginning I wanted to make a story about someone being kidnapped. It should be really thriller-like, but then I found out I was more interested in the formatics of the kidnap story than the actual kidnapping, so I just some little thriller elements of horror, but it’s not really horrible in the text.