“Just as every new country I live in has a unique flavour, feeling, taste, texture, smell - language carries on this perception through to the way we communicate. I am a fluent Norwegian speaker (in fact, I am by most outside definitions a Norwegian person too), however, Norwegian has always been an artificial language for me. When I speak Norwegian with my family, we speak it borderline mockingly, conveying irony, a synthetic distance. Words sound unfamiliar, I surprise myself and others with the strange things I say, yet these same fragments of meaning are part of a fully functional and seriously used language. It is for some organic; for me, plastic. All my words are covered in a thin, yet perceptible, plastic covering. It is like plastic restaurant display food, which I strongly identify with, collect obsessively and reflect over daily; it looks real from a distance, but if you come closer and take a good look, you will realize the extent to which you can be fooled. I wish I could eat plastic food. What kind of digestive enzymes would you need then?“

-Rosanna Vibe. 11:47, 28.01.15. Oslo.



“I have several times highly rated book plastic utstillingsmat online, but even I have not managed to give myself a good enough reason to book several kilograms with exhibition salad (such as using the fish counter). Hope to get to justify the purchase as soon as possible. I have however a few plastic lobsters. (And much else of plastic stuff). In Japan it is a completely separate neighborhood where you can buy plastic models of food. Restaurants special order models for exhibition of the dishes they offer, so that customers can decide what they want to eat before it gets. On the way, it should go faster and restaurant can spend less time on each customer. The Japanese embassy in Oslo has plastic food models borrowed. I've been looking at them several times. I like food that approximates vinyls: jelly, compressed processed fish cakes, puddings. Sticks.”

-Rosanna Vibe. 16:45, 22.01.15. Oslo.

(collaboration with Google Translate)

"I started writing down fragments of overheard conversation in quotation marks when I was in high school. I did not give much thought to what I was doing until much later; but I was strongly attracted to this way of presenting communication. I observed often, especially in Spanish, that quotation marks were used to emphasize parts of a sentence. This is not the proper grammatical use of them, and makes whatever is between the quotes appear distanced, covered by a synthetic layer; a sense of another reality - most read it as irony. "

 "I used to take things people said around me (ex," I think its much nicer for him to be standing upstairs. When he was downstairs, everybody would be complaining; this salad is terrible, there is not enough vegetables. (11:52, 29.01.15, Media Lab. Unknown person.)) and note down the time, place, and date the fragment was overheard. In this way, I worked with a kind of real-time subtitling of reality, words and actions, "abstracted, liquid events" were made solid immediately: tangible, physical evidence that reality has taken place. Proof of existence. What is reality?? "

“Does every language I speak change me? I peel off and re-apply the artificial coats of supple material, perfectly adapted to eachother, I become a different person each time. My four languages, my two passports, my inability to live in a country for more than four years. Another layer. But plastic is not a finite material. I worry about it breaking down. Nobody wants to last forever anyway. When plastic breaks down it becomes sticky, and bleeds over on the other materials you were trying to keep clean.”

“I am given the opportunity to reinvent myself, and my surroundings, every time I have to adapt to a new environment. I am like a piece of memory foam or semi-solid, temperate wax stuffed into the space between two objects. Like the muscle sections of a piece of cooked fish that fit perfectly into eachother. I will try my best to fill up the space seamlessly. Without environment, we can't prove our existence.”

“The borders of my body like to disappear.”


-Rosanna Vibe. 20-29.01.15. Oslo.