Many of the texts used were the same as in the previous version (The autonomy Capsule 1), but the installation took on a more trashy, personal look. The concept was the same but the expression was more chaotic. The installation was accompanied by a soundclip by Sigurd Gurvin.
This time the project incorporated a piece I worked on during my stay in New York in the autumn of 2009.
It never had a title, but was a kind of alter/fiction dedicated to a woman who I never met, but whose possessions I came across while I was there. She lived and worked in New York, and had recently died at the age of 104. It was such a strange thing to contemplate, all the knowledge and experience a person gains through 104 years of life just being gone. So I started researching this random life of a stranger, trying to find out what was left behind. 
The alter and accompanied text were among the results of that research. Although the text is fictional the subject-matter is based on what I found. The text from the alter is at the bottom of the page.
Because the situation in this exhibition was much more festive than on the previous occasion I dispensed with the rules of use, and rather than focusing on the viewer focused on the fictive inhabitant. I attempted to create an environment reflecting her state of mind. I wanted it to seem like she'd been in there a while, processing her ideas, living there. 
The "alter" text was as follows:
I never really asked her any questions, not about her life of where she lived before Mahatten. I never asked how she came to be here, or what her take was on the world. Being small I took her for granted and at face value. Growing older I came to see her almost as a pice of funiture in my expanding world, something I understood the form of and could difinitively name, that I had no need to further classify and found less and less use for. Less need for a familiar lap. She must have had a life of her own, summer holidays, brothers and sisters, she must have been through sixty years worth of life before I met her. In those days she called herself Betty. I wonder what her wages were, for looking after me all those years? What did she return to when she left our upper middle class opulence?
She lived to be 104. One hundred and four years of exerience, of learning and forgetting, of seeing things change. She saw women get the vote, get jobs, get miniskirts. She saw houses get electricity, then phones, then internett. She saw the dawn of TV then the dawn of MTV. She saw the world turn upsidedown.
The flat is empty, still, stale. Since she went to die in hospital no one has been here. There has been no one to send these three years past, since she walked out on her own two feet, locking the door behind her. So they have sent me to remove what was left, before renovation, before scrubbing her off the face of things.
Around me these possesions. They seem so flat, so irrelevant. What do they reprisent?
As I sift through papers I patch together a stranger. Her name was Betty. Her name was Boy Fong. I find an old bank statement form 1952. On it she has pactices in a childlike scrawl, in a hand unused to western letters, her new signiture, her new name; Betty, betty, betty, down the entire leangth of the envolope. Perhaps Boy Fong is not a easy name for a woman in New York. Yet she reverted to it. It seems like Betty only ever existed between the four walls of our apartment.
She must have had a husband. At some point she becomes Boy Fong Lee, the Lee having been added later in life. But there is no trace of this man beyond a few old letters written in Cantonese, of which only the name and address make any sence to me, being printed in careful english for the US postal system.
I find an old book. “Companion of the night”, the only one still here, though empty shelves suggest that there must once have been others. I suppose she sold them as her sight grew weak, or else gave them away. But this one she kept, perhaps I think, a dirty secret, an old ladies dirty book. Next to the grimey front window is an old, old chair, upholstered in a muskey green and red rose pattern. As I sit down it sends up a cloud of dry and cloying dust. The book is marked on page 31 by a check dated March 18, 1959. Its for ninteen dollars and ten cents and was never cashed. It is signed David Y. Soon.
Another pice of a puzzle. I know she must have been liberal minded. Such things my parents would never have stood for, so she will have kept it close to her chest, but the book gives her away. It is a political story in defence of the rights of protitutes. Not terribly well written, but reflected and to the point, only 127 little pages long. On one page, under the word “occasionally” are some words in cantonese in careful pencil script, each line made with even, light pressure to the pencil.
I put the book back down. There is so little here. A rice cooker, some clothes. A mebershipcard for the Tropicana in Atlantic city, she must have liked to gamble. Behind the bathroom mirror, in a blue envolope from the Irving Trust Company, are old banknotes, stuck together by damp, forty dollars. In desperate times, what good are forty dollars? The newest note is from 1963.
An old photo shows her staring at the camera, face forward, looking austere and in some way, recessive, deep within herself. I assume it must be an old passport photo or the like. Another shows her walking away in the background, the main focus of the picture being a group of asian men, looking leasurely on the steps of a building. When I knew her she was always the only asian in sight.
Everything that existed within her, her preception, her experience, her trials, her long and changeing life, is gone. One hundred and four years of life. With no children, no masterpice, no biography left behind.
Many thanks to Monica Anette Svorstøl and Susanne Sakariassen for lending me documentation.
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