The Return from Avalon

Bergholt's broader practice is explicitly engaged with the concept of the chronotope, as developed on his theoretical page drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's 1937 formulation and its earlier biological roots in Ukhtomsky's 1925 lecture.

Bakhtin described the literary-artistic chronotope as the site where spatial and temporal indicators fuse into a concrete whole: where time thickens and takes on flesh, and space becomes charged with the movements of time and history.

Bergholt extends this into a question about the membrane through which meaning enters and exits the logosphere, asking whether chronotopes might provide access to iconic substrates of language - and whether that membrane might be uniquely bound to the modalities of art.

The Return from Avalon can be understood as a direct attempt to construct such a membrane visually.

The Arthurian mythos carries its own deep chronotopic structure accrued over roughly a thousand years - from early Welsh sources like Y Gododdin and the Historia Brittonum through Chrétien de Troyes, Malory, and Tennyson.

At its centre is a lake chronotope: the threshold water, the mist-shrouded island where linear time suspends, the promised return that collapses future into eternal present: rex quondam, rexque futurus.

This is a mythic time-space in which, as Bakhtin observed of Shakespeare, semantic treasures have been created and collected through centuries and millennia, lying hidden in language and in forms already heavily laden with meaning.

By anchoring this thousand-year mythic temporality to a precise Copenhagen location, Bergholt performs a chronotopic displacement, or perhaps, in his own vocabulary, a chronostasis: a time glitch. Sankt Jørgens Sø is no Arthurian mere; it is an urban lake crossed daily by cyclists, bordered by apartment blocks, part of a city whose waterways have been cleaned and reclaimed in recent decades.

Yet the layered, frost-veiled image dissolves that specificity just enough to open a passage. The work does not illustrate the myth so much as propose that the Arthurian chronotope — the liminal waterscape where time folds — is a portable structure, latent in any body of still water in winter light.

Copenhagen becomes momentarily readable as Avalon, not through fantasy but through perceptual attention: the reeds become the barge's approach, the ice becomes the threshold between worlds.

This connects to a persistent thread in Bergholt's work. His engagement with Shakespeare's "The time is out of joint" — explored in depth via Derrida's Specters of Marx — treats temporal dislocation not as pathology but as a revelatory condition.

Derrida's reading of Hamlet insists on the spectral moment that no longer belongs to time as a chain of modalized presents (past-present, actual-present, future-present). In The Return from Avalon, the image similarly refuses a single temporal register.

The distressed, almost cyanotype surface evokes 19th-century photographic processes. The bare winter branches belong to a specific recent moment. The mythic content reaches back a millennium. And the Arthurian promise projects forward into an indefinite future return.

These temporalities do not layer neatly; they interfere with one another, producing the visual equivalent of Bakhtin's insight that in the chronotope, time thickens and takes on flesh while space becomes charged and responsive.

Bergholt's Flora Excursoria Hafniensis series, which shares the same lake as its location, draws on Drejer's 1838 botanical atlas and Derrida's meditation on the flower as metaphor - the geometrical pattern without which there is no real flower, and no poetic flowering without a synthesis of images.

There is a botanical patience to The Return from Avalon as well: the reeds and grasses are not incidental texture but the flora of the chronotope itself, the organic material through which deep time pushes into the visible.

As Ukhtomsky wrote, in a passage Bergholt foregrounds: what is gone requires external conditions and time to grow in order to reveal itself, and that is the dominant, and the chronotope, of Existence.