Ida Ekblad

HANNE MUGAAS: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

IDA EKBLAD: To live without music, poetry and the arts.

HM: Where would you like to live?

IE: Somewhere warm where I can swim with giant sea turtles and baby sperm whales every morning.

HM: Your idea of earthly happiness?

IE: Sailing the seven seas with my best friends, books of poetry and a boombox.

HM: Your favorite hero of fiction?

IE: Des Esseintes.

HM:Your favorite character in history?

IE: Jean Genet.

HM: Your favorite heroine in real life?

IE: French filmmaker Agnes Varda.

HM: Your favorite heroine of fiction?

IE: Pippi Longstocking.

HM:Who is your favorite painter?

IE: Josef Váchal, Lee Lozano, James Ensor, Philip Guston, Francis Bacon, Francis Picabia, Asger Jorn, Olga Carol Rama, Felix Jenewein and Jean Cocteau.

HM: What is your favorite artwork?

IE: I keep thinking and dreaming about Jan Zrzavý’s Údolí Smutku (1908) (The valley of sorrow.)

HM: Who is your favorite musician?

IE: Workshop, especially their song “Don’t give up.” Camel makes me dream, and Manuel Göttsching does too. Stevie Nicks (the pirate) makes me cry and so does Radka Toneff.

“Seabird” by Alessi Brothers is the song to crank up in cars on trips to the beach with friends and for my demons Roky Erickson and Janis Joplin.

HM: What is your favorite song?

IE: “Wild Combination” by Arthur Russell, “I Talk to the Wind” by King Crimson and “Yesterday and Today” by YES.

HM: What do you admire in a man?

IE: Sir, that he is fit (chuckle).

HM: And in a woman?

IE: Fantasy and that she is ruff ‘n’ tuff and rumbling and tumbling.

HM: Your favorite occupation?

IE: Lovemaking.

HM: Who would you have liked to be?

IE: Augustus Pablo at Java Live in 1986.

HM: Your marked characteristic?

IE: A considerably growling skratchy husky voice in a pepped up demoniac vessel.

HM: What do you value in your friends?

IE: A brew of adventurousness, weirdness and bewitching eyes with a sludge of warmth and naughtiness and a big cup of intelligence and me oh my and that they like to climb fences and lift horses.

HM: What is your principle defect?

IE: A bell of death inside my head that offers plenty of chimes both day and night.

HM: What would you like to be?

IE: A painter, sculptor, poet, dreamer, dancer and musician.

HM: Your favorite prose writer?

IE: Albert Camus

HM: Who are your favorite poets?

IE: Stefan Themerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Syd Barrett.

HM: Who is your favorite composer?

IE: Arthur Russell.

HM: What is your favorite name?

IE: Hildegard von Bingen.

HM: What natural gift would you most like to possess?

IE: Peace of mind.

HM: How would you like to die?

IE: Like Ivan Ilyich, I do not at all want to think about how I want to die.

HM: To what faults do you feel most indulgent?

IE: Lunacy.

HM: What is your motto?

IE: To be dancing like the prisoner in Un Chant d’Amour by Genet.

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Ida Ekblad was born in 1980 in Oslo, where she lives and works. Interview via Flash Art.

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