The inspiration for this project came from a discussion with a friend, about whether or not humans are innately evil. I said that this is not the case. That humans are driven by a need of self-preservation and self-realisation, and that this is a force which is related to instinct. When our identities are threatened, we fight. My friend maintained the opposite; "Look at all the evil things humans are capable of doing".

The discussion resulted in my exhibit Primates Society at the Kalmar Museum of Art in 1997, of which the Swedish version of Cd Primates was a part.

About the exhibition Primates Society
The exhibition was an investigation of the human instincts. It was built up around sounds, and the visual apperance was weak.

From an open window at the entrance of the museum you could hear a man and a woman viciously quarreling. The realism created insecurity in the visitors. The argument also awoke strong reactions with memories from childhood and own broken relationships.

An ordinary residential property basement was built up in the cellar of the museum; with stores, peoples belongings etc. Three hidden loud speakers behind air-intakes showed the lifes in the "apartments" above. People shouting, quarrelling, arguing. Scenes that often happens behind closed doors. The visitors became eavesdroppers to events they normally only experience in their own lives.

The exhibition spoke more to our instincts and unconscious mind than to our so highly appreciated intellect.

About CD Primates
CD Primates - Swedish version was made in 1997 with the actors Bente Danielsson and Mats Rudal. The English version was made year 2000 with the English actors Vic Bryson and Graham Christopher.

CD primates is a unique vocal exposure of so-called "civilized" humans. 45 minutes of a quarrel between a man and a woman, a married couple. Family, work, sex and love - it is, at times, ugly, horrifying, and even funny. How far have humans really evolved?

Before the recording of the quarrel and the exhibition I read several social investigations, interviewed a psychiatrist and a scientist at Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet in Stockholm.

- I have chosen the quarrel as focal-point, because it contains several basic components. Threats and constructs are used as weapons; war from a daily perspective. The quarrel in itself is uninteresting, but within it our human needs are clarified; the needs to be seen, fulfilled and to have a value.

Quotations
"Lying under the cerebral hemispheres, at the top of the brain stem, are the reptile brain and the brain of the old mammal, which contain the basic survival programs related to flight from danger, hunger, thirst, procreation and parental care. These parts of the human brain evolved between 100 million and 300 million years ago.

Today the cerebral cortex, newest and most important region in the human brain, folds around and smothers the older and more primitive regions. Yet these regions have not been completely overpowered. They remain underneath, no longer in undisputed command of the body, but still active.

These primitive parts of the human brain continue to operate in accordance with a stereotyped and unthinking set of programs that go back to the mammals on the forest floor, and back farther still to the reptiles who spawned the mammal tribe.

Experiments have shown that much of the human repertoire of behavior originates in deeply buried regions of the brain that once directed the business of life for our ancestors".

From the book: "The Enchanted Loom, Mind in the Universe" by ROBERT JASTROW

"Culture is an agent for flexible control of action that follows its own dynamics of evolution. One of its functions is to modulate impulses, once adaptive but now hazardous, with origins in genetic predisposition that biological evolution would require many hundreds of generations to change.

There is a certain flexible - yet definable - human nature that has been shaped by biological evolution and that continues to influence human life."

Arne Öhman, Professor of Psychology