Installation view of Diamond People – Instruction for a film at Bildmuseet, Umeå

Diamond People – Instructions for a film was presented as a solo show at Bildmuseet in Umeå Nov 21, 2010 – January 30, 2011 (curated by Katarina Pierre) and as part of the group show “The Crude and the Rare” at 41 Cooper Union Gallery in New York City, Oct 19 – Nov 20, 2010 (curated by Saskia Bos and Steven Lam). It will be presented in a forthcoming book project, The Strange Case of Carbon, with texts by Jill Magi, Johan Lundh, Steven Lam, Erin Lee and Katarina Pierre, edited by Avi Alpert.

Excerpt from the Press release from Bildmuseet, Umeå:
Sara Jordenö’s recent body of work, Diamond People – Instructions for a film, traces the process of globalization through a specific material: the synthetic diamond, a material that points to the contradictions that lie in the construction as well as abstraction of value. The project takes as it’s starting point Sara Jordenö’s first place of work, a synthetic diamond factory in Robertsfors. As a former factory employee and resident in the community, the artist is performing – and shifting between – the roles of the participant and the observer, insider and outsider.

Sara Jordenö uses film, photography, drawing and poetry to work her way through historical and contemporary narrations of a small factory community in northern Sweden and its relationship to two other synthetic diamond factories owned by the same company and located in Springs, South Africa and Suzhou Industrial Park, China. What begins as an investigation of these interconnected ‘diamond communities’, soon becomes an inquiry into the processes of documentary writing and artistic practice informed by anthropological fieldwork. Rather than reaching a consensus, the project attempts to allow the tension between multiple viewpoints as well as between text and image. It is also a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of artistic fieldwork and the artist adopts a self-reflective mode of working and a critical approach to documentary narration.

The grounding element in Diamond People is the image of carbon, an element capable of producing both graphite, among the softest of materials, and diamond, the hardest on the planet. These elements take on allegorical relationships to the subject matter: diamonds come to represent the material conditions of labour, politics and reality at large, while graphite stands in for note-taking, writing and representation in general. But as the texts and images explore the progress of the diamonds, we are subtly reminded of the ways in which this element’s materials, which appear at first as stark contradictions, are in fact mutually constitutive. Representation and reality are as allotropic as graphite and diamond.

Diamond People: Instructions for a Film and The Strange Case of Carbon has been realized in collaboration with Film i Västerbotten, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Konstnärsnämnden and Västerbottens museum.