In Last Testament of Forest Thoughts, a discarded tarp becomes the starting point for an exploration of material transformation and memory. Once intended to protect, it has instead been shaped by prolonged exposure to the very environment it resisted, acquiring new textures and qualities over time. In close proximity, Gösta took a photo of a forest, shortly before it was unexpectedly cleared. The work preserves this moment through a process rooted in place: charcoal, produced from remnants found at the site, is used as pigment for the print. The tarp and its wooden structure form a portable object, held together by straps. As both image and structure, the piece moves between documentation and displacement, asking how a landscape might persist when carried elsewhere.

In these five works, Gösta explores the notion of cloth as a vessel. Seeing textile as an essential extension of one’s body, it is also becomes what holds us through life, communicating to the outside.

In this series of oil paintings, Gösta opens up portals to spaces otherwise closed off to one’s memory. Taking a starting point at his Paris home in the 18ème arrondiessement, a dim light guides us on an inner path, where body and material seems inseparbable.

In the performance Maybe earth is just a dirty old man, Gösta von Platen brings out an alter ego reflecting his artistic practice; what character would personify his physical work? The question arose from his previous piece Last Testament of Forest Thoughts, also shown at the Ma:Matter:Materia event. A drifting mass, a wide array of materials seemingly merged into chaotic matter; objects the artist has collected or made himself, then sewn together by hand. One large costume containing a table, a stool, a record player, sticks and stones, metal scraps and much more, even the face covered with twigs. The shell itself becomes the shelter where a scene of both loneliness and liberation takes place.

The title of the performance, which also shaped its dramaturgy, is drawn from the repeated lyric “I’m just a dirty old man, oh yeah” in Yello’s acid house track Vicious Games (Mo’s Dirty Ol Dub #1), released in 1991; creating an atmosphere where a gritty nightclub met a forgotten cabin in the woods. This was the first performance by Gösta von Platen, as an elongation of his artistic practice, questioning who his work is really for and what we humans actually do to the matter that surrounds us.