Megan and Murray McMillan

We are building a model landscape as the set of our next photo / video work. This is a mock-up of the platform. We’re using recycled wood as the scaffold and a thin foam for the contours of the land.

We’re in the process of building a set for the new video we’re shooting for our show that opens here at Gallery Titanik on July 10. We needed wood for the set and were planning on a bus journey to Bauhaus to purchase materials and pay 50 Euro to have them delivered, when one of the gallery artists told us about the national theater down the road that throws away lots of wood from discarded sets.

Three treks to the theater dumpster later, we’re fully stocked and are ready to start building.

This is one of the final images from our photo and video shoot yesterday.

This is the traditional wooden Swedish fishing boat that carried us out to sea today for our video and photo shoot. It was indeed piloted by a nimble Captain, who navigated us around the archipelago, through narrow passages cut in the red granite – so narrow we could have reached out and touched the walls – until we were out at sea. He maneuvered our boat up to a small, rocky island and our performer, a seasoned and storied sailor, hopped onto the rocks where we left him while we shot from the boat.

It was quite a successful sea voyage.

This isn’t where we want to shoot: it’s a small peninsula and it’s just our backup location. But, it would be SO MUCH EASIER to shoot here, since it’s relatively easy to get to. That said, our idea needs an archipelago island in the middle of the sea, and we fear that any imitation will be lackluster.

Producing this photo and video has more technical constraints than previous works. Our location demands a small boat in order to get a performer on the island through treacherous water with many dangerous rocks just under the surface. The captain of the small boat that’s taking us to the island used to captain gigantic cruise ships: he’s very Han Solo.

A small boat means compact set fabrication, so we’re using old stars. More on this tomorrow.

We’ve arrived at The Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence in Kökar (pronounced Chur-Car), an artists residency in the Baltic Sea. Actually, to be brutally honest, we’ve been here 10 days already, but got behind writing about everything happening in Germany.

So fast forward: Kökar is beautiful as is the Finnish Archipelago, which consists of thousands of small islands in the Baltic Sea. Some islands are the size of a bus and it’s one of these small islands that we will be filming at this Sunday. More on this tomorrow.