Foreword
Selected

This book contains texts selected from 25 books dating from 1985-2009. Many of the texts have a different visual presentation in the original. Some were written by hand woven into drawings. Others were originally presented with colours or illu-strations, while others again wander in between books. The texts loose something when they’re removed from their original context but perhaps through chronological presentation one finds something else. Texts from eight of the books were originally published in Norwegian and on this occasion are translated to English.

A couple of years ago I read through some of my first text-based books and realised that they were no different to how I write now. I was initially a little alarmed at this discovery. Was it possible that nothing had changed over all these years? Am I still stamping on the same ground as I stamped 25 years ago? When I recovered from the shock, I understood that the situation was a little more nuanced than I had initially thought. It was almost as though I stamped on one place at the same time as I stamped somewhere else, or to be even more precise, I stamp in several places at the same time, while always stamping on the place I first stamped on. It’s a form of synchronized stamping that goes on at different times, at the same time. It doesn’t sound so very synchronized but it is. It’s the same and not the same at the same time, at different times.

In exactly the same way that the texts from the first two 1985 books influenced later text work, the book «Football and More» influenced a great deal of work after 2005. «Football and More » was like an «upside down» book compared to the earlier work. This book didn’t search for a few sentences to display a new image, it included all the details, important and unimportant. A complexity emerged that’s visible and concealed at the same time.

Anyhow, I thought it would be nice to present some of the texts chronologically. The text order follows the work flow and although they often connect in different ways, they’re physically separated when they appear in different books. In this book they meet again.