“The Mystery of Mary B” and “Warnings from the Living” are collages of voices, shadows, newspapers and linoleum, sketches for a mausoleum perhaps, or a tombstone, for my grandmother Mary Bergliot Berg, an eccentric woman born in 1893. She died a few months before my father committed suicide in 1982, when I was 17 and had not met her for many years.

“ - Then it was a shame you had a son?

- No, on the contrary. A mother with her son forms an image, which a mother and daughter do not. At the same time, men in the next generation will become something completely different from men today.

- What are the conditions for an unmarried mother?

- That she is whole enough and true enough to be able to guide a small human being. If she succeeds, the result will be that a healthier and richer person comes out of such a child, Bergliot Berg concludes, as she squeezes her little boy’s hand.”

“The excerpt is taken from an interview with my grandmother printed in Dagbladet in 1933.”

The works shown at Podium are work-in-progress and arise from an ongoing collaboration between Lene Berg and Ida Ribu, the NyVon working group, lighting designer Gard Gitlestad, editor Erland Edenholm and Øyvind Bast, who are collaborators who will continue both in this project and in other projects in the future.