This title alludes to the passage in the Odyssey where the hero, returning home, must guide his ship and his entire crew through a narrow strait flanked on one side by an immeasurable monster called Charybdis; and by a six-headed monster called Scylla on the other. The Homeric text makes us understand that the hero, knowing that a monster will attack his ship anyway, evaluates that sailing on the side of Scylla which will devour at least six of its crew members, is a better decision than facing Charybdis which would swallow the ship in its entirety.
Thus “between Scylla and Charybdis” has become an allegory of having to choose between two evils, and Scylla, by extension, has come to symbolize the lesser evil.
Niels Bugge has been attracted to this concept of the lesser evil, associating it with neoliberal narratives of scarcity and urgency of present and recent past. These narratives which underlie the development of strategies and the supposed making of good decisions, largely discard broader and more fundamental perspectives.
Despite her prominent position in (probably) the best-known story of European antiquity, Scylla is largely absent from the visual legacy of Greek mythology. Which is unusual, considering the impact of her better-known counterparts such as Medusa, Minotaur, Hydra, Pegasus, the Sphinx, or Cerberus. Scylla in the Odyssey is described as having twelve disjointed, tentacle-like legs, with six monstrous heads on serpentine necks. However, most ancient portrayals of her depart from Homer’s text, depicting her rather as a mermaid with the heads of six dogs protruding from her midriff.
This disjunction, already occurring in antiquity, hints towards a possible reason for Scylla's comparative absence. Maybe Scylla fails to attract the imagination in the same way as for example medusa, or Quetzalcoatl or the Xenomorph, because her design is bad; it simply fails to activate an internal image making process.
Ironically, the defects in her design-description might be appropriate for a monster representing "the lesser evil" in a false dichotomy.
However, for Niels, these considerations are not ends in themselves. They are motors that drive a creative process, which focuses on experimentation with form and composition, on 3D modeling and its transitions to printing and sculpture. These transitions are approached as opposite movements: for sculptures, going from the flat surface of the screen, to the physical world of volume. This movement is reversed in the printing process: where the mobile world of adjustable lights, dynamic textures and instantly malleable shapes is frozen and transfigured into the graphic flatness of the screen print.
These movements are neither reductive nor cumulative, they are gaps or failures that prompt intuitive decisions and open new paths. For example when a screen print cannot represent the shine of a metal detail, or when the gaps in a sculpture about to be cast demand departures from its digital model origins.
Through these technical transformations, Niels’ works travel between a range of themes, from failure of imagination and cognitive dissonances, to the fascination with violence, monsters, and the geopolitical context in which this creative reflection, called Scylla, unfolds.
NB, OCSN / CDMX, 2024