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I.
Four Valkyries sit in heavy, stony silence, consigned to earthly immobility.
They perform their civic duty at ground level, overseen by the City Hall.
They try to exchange glances, but their granite garments lock them in.
They ask, endlessly: What happened to our battledress, our unearthly powers? Were we not dreaded and feared, the choosers of the slain? What is left to us now?

It’s been said that on nights long ago the Valkyries flew over the city, hunting the harbour stews at dawn and dusk, picking off the broken bodies of labourers and working girls.
They sighted the workers’ familiar drunken stumbling, their wasted limbs and worn-out faces.
They thundered above the buildings, making their mighty selves visible to mortal eyes.
They chose and descended. Unleashing their terrible power. Plucking the wrung-out bodies from their unending toil. Taking their victims for dead.

No! The humans pleaded. Spare us. We’ll do anything!
We are worn out but we have skills said the carpenter, holding up his hands.  

The Valkyries paused to consider their spoils.

Yes! The workers continued. We will make your terrible powers visible. In your honour we will remake you in stone: monuments that will outlast us all here on earth!

The Valkyries were moved by the desperate gesture.
They said: you will live out the rest of your days working on our portraits.

The labourers devoted themselves to appeasement.
Picking up their tools to tame four giant blocks of stone. Stripping away jagged edges. Modelling fleshy masses. But as the craftsmen’s hands hacked, then caressed, the resisting stone, the Valkyries’ power weakened.
They grew passive curves and gentle smiles. No! Now it was the Valkyries who protested, but their voices were trapped; imprisoned in time and matter.
They mourned their fall and grieved their lost skies. Unhearing, the labourers moved their hands over the frozen limbs, and hurried their task along. 
 

II.
Silence of the Valkyries is a four-channel video work by Laura Cooper. In it, the camera and two people choreographically explore the interior and exterior sculptures and murals of Oslo’s Radhus (City Hall). The work results from a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist Laura Cooper and dancer Edwin Cabascango, developed during PRAKSIS’s month-long mucker mate residency in May-June 2016.

Conducting playful interventions in specific sites throughout Oslo, mucker mate’s participants sought to challenge behavioural codes and prescribed movement, and to expand the parameters of their artistic relationship to place and to each other. This performance-to-camera work is the outcome of one such experiment in the city. Cooper invited Cabascango to climb and explore the giant naked female statues of Valkyries that stand outside the Oslo City Hall, and filmed his response.

Cabascango interprets Cooper’s request by testing his body against the mass and surface of the sculpture. He adapts his movements to the contours of the stone body, climbing it, measuring its extent, mimicking its curves and angles, experiencing its weight and density, insinuating himself around it. An unreciprocated intimacy is established. The footage, amplified and accentuated in a four-screen presentation, explores ideas of temporality, monumentality, and the limits and vulnerabilities of the body. It contrasts the profoundly tangible solidity of sculpture with our own mobile, vulnerable and expressive bodies, and reflects on sculpture’s capacity to express ideas or archetypes – in particular, nations’ and movements’ exemplification of the ‘body politic’ through representations of the female body.