13/05/2026
Best Before Collective presents;
The Advantages of Depression: Season Seven – The Temperature of Things
1/5 -31/5
Hedda Roterud Amundsen
You lie in bed for so long that time begins to soften at the edges. Days slide into one another. The compartments in the pill organizer become markers of time,
almost like a dark kind of advent calendar. The cold light from the laptop screen cuts through the darkness of the room, the familiar rhythm of yet another
episode automatically sliding into the next. Things begin to pile up around you: empty cans, an overflowing ashtray, clothes on the floor, pizza boxes.
There is no making yet. Only accumulation. Screenshots. Subtitles. Phrases that stick for reasons not immediately clear.
Collecting becomes a way of keeping time.
Eventually you leave the room. You begin picking up rocks, as you did as a child. One by one. Solid, uncomplicated. Their weight is real. Holding them in your
hand becomes a tactile way of reconnecting with the world.
Years later, this archive — the rocks and the subtitles — still forms the gravitational core of The Advantages of Depression, an ongoing project unfolding across
multiple “seasons.” It is not a f inished narrative, but a system for returning, a place to begin again.
In The Temperature of Things, shown in the window gallery beneath Hornstull subway station, two familiar expressions hang suspended in space: soft like
butter and hard as a rock. The phrases feel almost too familiar, like something half remembered from everyday speech, but here they have shifted slightly out
of place.
Soft like butter takes on the texture of stone. Hard as a rock clothes itself in the softness of butter, marked by traces of repeated movements of a knife. The
materials contradict the language, creating a small short circuit between what is said and what is seen.
Butter and stone carry different temperatures, different tempos, different lives. One belongs to the kitchen counter, to the body, to the domestic and the peris-
hable. The other belongs to geological time, weight, endurance, and age. Here they exchange places.
