About the participants – Thursday 26 January
INSPIRATION
NILS OLE BUBANDT / Prof., University of Aarhus (DK)
Nils Bubandt is Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University and editor-in-chief – with Mark Graham – of the journal Ethnos. He was research leader with Anna Tsing of “AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene” (anthropocene.au.dk) and currently heads the research project “BLUE: Multispecies Ethnographies of Oceans in Crisis” (blue.au.dk).
Talk
Nils Bubandt’s presentation will reflect on two interesting aspects of his involvement in recent years with research that tries to reinvent how we understand the world in a time of radical environmental and climatic disruption by learning from other disciplines. The first aspect is analytical. It is the idea to see, conceptualize, and study the Anthropocene as “patchy” – a mosaic of landscapes that are simultaneously unique and connected to each other in histories of both politics and ecology. The second aspect is methodological. It is an approach that sees and develops method as forms of prosthetics. Like shoes, methods are prosthetics that allow us access to the landscapes (or seascapes) we seek to study. We call these “rubber boots methods”. Rubber boots methods allow peripatetic access to landscapes. But these methods are not innocent. Like rubber boots, they come from somewhere. Rubber boots methods therefore have to be reflexive: every prosthetics has a history, often one inflected by colonial-capitalist power relations. Rubber boots methods of the patchy landscapes of the Anthropocene allow us to approach every landscape on its own cultural and aesthetic terms BUT ALSO as part of a planetary history.
https://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/nils-ole-bubandt(54cd6543-344a-462b-94d9-401711326190).html
SUSAN BALLARD / Associate Prof., Te Herenga Waka – Wellington University
Susan Ballard is ass prof. at Te Herenga Waka – Wellington University, New Zealand. Susan is an interdisciplinary art historian and writer. Her research sits in the fields of contemporary art history and environmental humanities, and examines the histories of nature in contemporary art with a particular focus on artists from Asia-Pacific. From 2011-2020, Susan was Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Creative Practice
Her recent publications have focused on how artists have responded to species extinctions, energy, disaster, geology and landscape in the Anthropocene; Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants and People (2020), and A Transitional Imaginary: Space, Network and Memory in Christchurch (2015).
Susan’s presentation will be based on her recent book Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics published by Routledge in 2021.
https://people.wgtn.ac.nz/susan.ballard
HERMAN BASHIRON MENDOLICCHIO / University of Barcelona – researcher, writer, editor, curator
Herman Bashiron Mendolicchio is a researcher, writer, editor and curator working across different disciplines, territories and cultures. He holds an international PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of Barcelona and he is currently working at the University of Barcelona and UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya). His current lines of investigation involve the subjects of intercultural processes, participation, collaboration, travelling, globalization and mobility in contemporary arts and cultural policies. His practice and research explore the topics of art in public space, walking/journeying practices and the broader interactions between contemporary creation and transnational relations.
As an art critic, editor and independent curator, he collaborates with international organizations and institutions and writes extensively for several international magazines. He co-authored publications such as Art in Context – Learning from the field, Art and Mobility, and Walking Art / Walking Aesthetics, and curated projects and exhibitions like “Utopian Tomorrow” and “Cyclic Journey”. He is co-founder of the Platform for Contemporary Art and Thought, InterArtive.
www.transartinstitute.org/people/herman-bashiron-mendolicchio
PRACTICE
SESSION 2 / 14.00-15.30
CHRISTINE FENTZ
Christine Fentz is artistic director of Secret Hotel. Her performances are participatory and with a focus on the more-than-human: her latest works being about ants, and about bees. The upcoming performance will be about the forest. She lives at Earthwise Residency, where the focus also is all those ‘people’ we share the planet with.
Workshop: Meeting other people
Refshaleøen is home for many types of people and entities. Grasses, birds, concrete, hawthorn, mussels, seawater, rusting iron, tar, wind and spirits from gone by times. In our 90 min. together, I will tell about my work in Secret Hotel and at Earthwise Residency, and then invite you outdoors. Here you can taste some strategies and methods for meeting and interacting with some of these people. Some we do together, some will be done alone.
RUNE FJORD
Rune Fjord STUDIO udvikler tværkunstneriske projekter med metoder fra billedkunst, design og arkitektur og ledes til daglig af kunstner Rune Fjord, som er uddannet fra Kunsthåndværkerskolen i Kolding, Danmarks Designskole og Kunstakademiet i Reykjavik. Fjord har arbejdet professionelt med kunst og design i over 20 år og har givet kunstinstitutioner som Copenhagen Contemporary, ARoS, Sorø Kunstmuseum, Museet for Samtidskunst, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Odsherred Museum, Dansk Arkitektur Center, Esbjerg Kunstmuseum og Ordrupgaard erfaringer med at arbejde på inddragende og samskabende vis i forskellige eksperimenterende laboratorieformater, særligt med fokus på det sanselige, æstetiske sprog i krydsfeltet mellem kunst, naturvidenskab og krop.
Workshop: Scent mirror
Field laboratory for beauty and decay. We live in an image-oriented age, where the sense of sight is often prioritized over other senses, but both the sense of smell and the sense of hearing affect us very directly and immediately before both the visual sense and the intellect take over. In the workshop, we will work with scent tests and experiment with collected plant materials from the Refshaleøen. The workshop is based on the laboratory that was held in Liselund Have on Møn in connection with www.liselundlaboratorium.org
– indoor / in Danish
OLEG KOEFOED
Oleg Koefoed, aktionsfilosof, har arbejdet i et par årtier med kulturelle, filosofiske, æstetiske og kunstneriske metoder til at aktualisere, forstå og samarbejde om bæredygtig og regenerativ eksistens. Formålet med Koefoeds praksis er at skabe stærkere grundlag for at begribe, hvordan vi som art indgår i relationer til de økologier, vi til enhver tid skabes af og fodrer tilbage til. Siden 2020 har han primært arbejdet med immersive måder at forstærke menneskelig sårbarhed med henblik på at skabe det eksistentielle grundlag for et regenerativt paradigme.
Workshop: Terratories
Workshoppen er en undersøgelse af menneskelig og mere-end-menneskelig dannelse af territorier og vores artslige og mellemartslige relationer og naboskaber. Deltagerne vil komme i nærkontakt med jorden på Refshaleøen og foretage en autodokumentation af deres egen og andre arters territoriedannelse. Denne dokumentation indgår som grundlag for en deling inspireret af samtaleformatet “The Impossible Conversation” af Building Conversation, som Koefoed var guide for i 2022.
– partly outdoor / in Danish
MADELEINE KATE MCGOWAN
Madeleine Kate McGowan creates large-scale immersive sonic installations and works in the intersection of performance, sound, video and writing. McGowan is Artistic Leader of Stedets Væsen and founder of several artist-communities such as Other Story (EUR) and Time and Space Died Yesterday (NYC). Currently she is working on the sonic installation Solastalgia and the artist platform Haveværten at an old industrial site in Herlev, as part of New European Bauhaus. McGowan’s film and performance work has been presented at Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Sort/Hvid, British Film Institute (BFI), ARoS, Billboard Istanbul, Cph Stage, Danish House in Palestine, Trinity College Dublin, Nivaagaards Malerisamling, CPH:DOX, Karen Blixens Rungstedlund, Nationalmuseet, Souriyat Across Borders Amman and Nikolaj Kunsthal.
Workshop: Book of Songs
Through a journey of vocal plateaus, participants will explore the song and sound arrangements of Solastalgia. Solastalgia (/ˌsɒləˈstældʒə/) is a neologism formed by the combination of the Latin words sōlācium (comfort) and the Greek root -algia (pain, suffering, grief) that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. Madeleine Kate McGowan, accompanied by operasinger Lucie Cure, will invite participants on a walk through landscapes and songs, exploring the possibilities of setting the voice free as a way of living in times of crisis.
– partly outdoor / in English
MAJA KRISTINE CHRISTENSEN
Har arbejdet i div. kunstgrupper, bl.a. med immersivt teater (Wunderland), performative samtaler (Building Conversation) og har undersøgt, hvordan mennesker relaterer til steder og naturen. Som fotograf og filmmager har hun lavet billeder til musik, og for tiden udvikler hun kreative uddannelsesformater/transformative learning – bl.a. om vores forhold til naturen. Hun er MA in Arts og Holistic Science (UK).
Workshop: Tingenes Råd
Et legende og performativt samtaleformat, der udfordrer og undersøger det verdenssyn, der placerer mennesket i centrum af universet for at undersøge relationen mellem mennesker og de ikke-menneskelige objekter. Tingenes Råd undersøger, hvad der sker, hvis vi lader objekter og fænomener tale for sig selv. Samtaleteknikken er inspireret af den franske filosof Bruno Latour, som er fortaler for, at objekter har egne rettigheder og værdier. Samtaleformen Tingenes Råd er udviklet af Building Conversation (NL).
– partly outdoor / in Danish
KATRINE FABER
Katrine Faber is a singer, actress, voice performer, theatre director, composer and psychotherapist
from Denmark. She is artistic director of Teater Viva, expanding the perception of theatre into
an artistic space, where we can meet ourselves, each other, and our living environment in an extended resonance. Since 2015 with Singing Our Place: a Nordic cross art project about humans, our living surroundings and our common future. Singing Our Place has created performances, concerts, workshops, talks, sound installations and festivals in Denmark, England, Iceland, Finland, Sweden, and Greenland. www.teaterviva.dk
Workshop: Singing Our Place
In this Singing Our Place workshop, we work with our bodies and voices in a meeting with voices from our living environment -what we usually call nature, but which often indicates something outside of ourselves. Here we challenge this notion of separation between human and our surroundings. In the workshop, we examine our bodies as landscapes full of sound and life. We examine the landscape we are in as a body full of sound and life. We listen to the Earth as a living body full of vibrating sounds and life. We explore how, through focused and open-minded work, we can express and move with the human voice into the non-human. We dissolve worn-out languages, step into the wordless, and create new languages between the human and the non-human. You do not have to be good.
– partly outdoor / in Danish
SESSION 2 / 14.00-15.30
HELLO!EARTH
hello!earth insists that art is a place for big and fragile visions. A laboratory space, where new thoughts and ideas can become reality, and where we together create the world instead of consuming it. The base of the work is an inquiry into consciousness and an exploration of the myth of reality. With the audience as the co-creating and central element, the works attempt to unfold the potential of relations between people and place and make interconnectedness and diversity tangible. The works are always spaces for an audience to experience, sense and do, and as a collective force shape a response to the pressing ecological and political situation and inspire change towards regenerative practices and visions.
Workshop: The sensing body as the activist
How would big politics look like if it was shaped by the sensing body? How to offer conditions, where the body is invited to inhabit complex and paradoxical questions and seemingly abstract topics such as economy, environmental or social issues? How can the body be catalyst for producing thought and become a transformative resource, a form of activism? Inspired by their work “THE NIGHT – visioning a post-capitalist society while we sleep”, Vera Maeder and Jacob Langaa Sennek invite into a short joint laboratory, relating to this aspect of their work. Followed by examples from previous works and open dialog.
– indendørs + 5 min. udendørs / på engelsk
NANA FRANCISCA SCHOTTLÄNDER
Nana Francisca Schottländer (1977) works cross-aesthetically within choreography, performance and installation. Central to her work is the use of the body as a living tool for investigation and creation. Her work revolves around co-creative potentials in encounters with other-than-human entities and phenomena and in recent years, her focus has been on explorations of the nature/human dichotomy in dialogues with landscapes and material cycles that are shaped by human intervention.
Workshop: Material Meditations
“… the entities that coexist with us obtrude on our awareness with greater and greater urgency. Three cheers for the so-called ‘end of the world’, since this moment is the beginning of history, the end of the human dream that reality is significant for them alone.” (Timothy Morton, 2013)
How can we step beyond the instrumentalization of other-than-human beings, matters and resources to engage in respectful and intimate encounters with something existing on radically different terms than ourselves? Material Meditations is a journey through encounters and exchanges with the matter and materials journeying through the anthropogenic landscapes of Refshaleøen and the ongoing stories of our entanglements.
– partly outdoor / in Danish
SONJA STRANGE
Sonja Strange (1981) is a Danish visual artist, who lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Jutland Academy of Arts in 2008 and from VSUP – Academy of Arts, Prague, Czech Republic. Strange has exhibited at home and abroad.
Sonja Strange’s works explore the space between the indefinable and the definable. In this space, on this form of horizon line, between heaven and earth, Strange finds her topics, which most often are materialized site-specifically and which are based on local stories, legends and myths. Through a ritual approach to the project, the works unfold in materials and media such as textiles, video, text,
sound and painting.
Workshop: Becoming One
Becoming One is a performance that involves the participants and unites practice, form and content in various sensitive and sensuous performative actions. Using simple techniques, Sonja Strange will create a ritualistic performance where the participants will experience being part of a living work that they can take home with them, as a bodily and loving experience. ‘Together we will become one.’
– indoor / in Danish (SESSION SHARED with Tina Tarpgaard)
TINA TARPGAARD
Tina Tarpgaard creates choreographic work for beings, objects and spaces. She deals with the possibility of de-centering the human in the performative space. Her latest artistic work is the trilogy THE MEMBRANE project, which this workshop will focus on, attempts to confront the human performer with other biological beings aiming to create spaces that invite for empathetic interspecies interaction.
Tina Tarpgaard is the founder and artistic director of recoil performance group. From February 1st, she is the director of Sydhavn Teater in Copenhagen.
Workshop: The MEMBRANE PROJECT
This workshop will be part presentation, part movement. We will begin with a short visual presentation of the MEMBRANE PROJECT and the concepts behind the artistic project MASS – bloom explorations, a choreographic installation involving one human performer and thousands of co-performing mealworms. Following will be a movement workshop based on the choreographic scores and the element of performing slowness which was involved in the project, and finally we will meet our tiny companion and co-creater, the mealworm. Be prepared to be moved by someone much smaller than you.
– indoor / in Danish (SESSION SHARED with Sonja Strange)
METTE AAKJÆR / WUNDERLAND
Mette is passionate about exploring cracks in the reality we think we know. With Wunderland – along with international artists from different artforms – she creates experiences that invite an intuitive, associative inner state, where understanding becomes bodily kaleidoscopic. Coming from experimental dance and physical theatre, she has created her own immersive work since 1993 and explores audience participation, interactivity and sensory tools since 2001. www.wunderland.dk
Workshop: Doors of Perception
This workshop is a taster of Wunderland’s immersive, sensorial and highly physical participatory methodology. You will hear briefly about Wunderland’s work before we dive into physical and sensorial investigations. We will shift our awareness into different doors – or frames – of perception. Through these doors we will explore sensations and communication with landscapes and surroundings. If the weather allows it, we will be outside, so bring warm clothes and good shoes.
– outside / walking included / in English
SØREN LOSE & THOMAS SEEST
Søren Lose er billedkunstner uddannet fra bl.a. Det Kgl. Danske Kunstakademi (1998-2003) med baggrund i en researchbaseret/konceptuel praksis. Mediemæssigt har han arbejdet primært med foto og video over installatoriske og skulpturelle projekter i institionel kontekst til de seneste år også at arbejde med natur- og genbrugsmaterialer i det offentlige rum.
Thomas Seest arbejder hovedsageligt med foto og video, ofte med et performativt udtryk. Som overordnet tema undersøger han relationen mellem den indre og den ydre verden. Det være sig kropsligt, metafysisk, seksuelt, socialt og tidsligt.
Sammen er de tilknyttet Guldborgsund Kommune som huskunstnere.
Workshop: Planteværen
Vi transformerer os for en stund til plantevæsener og interagerer med naturen i en praktisk og metafysisk planteworkshop direkte i det lokale wasteland omkring Teaterøen.
– outdoor / in Danish
TREVOR DAVIES
Founding director of Copenhagen International Theater. 40 years experience at the macro and micro levels of cultural production, which have been generated at the cutting edge of contemporary performance, inter-cultural perspectives and the fascination of place as a collective construct. Davies has formed, created, curated and mentored a plethora of festivals, cultural platforms and artistic projects with site-based creations often at the core.
Workshop: Instant, intuitive and immersive mapping
Before we create site-specific we need to map the place. The saying goes that ”place is space with meaning”. What meaning? How do we react, connect, interpret and codify fleeting glances, materials, reflections, sporadic sounds, smells, and how does this trigger associations, memories or imagined scenarios? Do we all decode places the same – is it the same place in fact? How do we relate, and how does this build a relationship? We wander as a flock of human seismographs and edit our scribbled and scattered haiku notes into a random collective stream of reflection depending…
– partly outdoor / in English
REFLECTIONS
SUSANNE DANIG / leder BIRCA
Susanne Danig is performing arts producer, mentor for the performing arts field, management consultant and international innovator. She is the owner of Danig Performing Arts Service and BIRCA – Bækkelund International Residency Center for Artists. Previously, she was director of the Danish ITI Center and manager for several Danish theatres as well as festival producer.
She has international expertise in creating festivals and in developing arts institutions, and has also been a consultant at the Danish Arts Foundation. Susanne has a degree in Comparative Literature and Modern Culture Studies from University of Copenhagen and has studied at Shippenburgs University in USA and Sorbonne in France.
GRY HEDIN / forsker på SMK
Gry Hedin (f. 1974) er projektforsker på SMK med forskningsprojektet Landbrug og landskab – SMKs landskabsmalerier i et klimakritisk nu. Hun er uddannet fra kunsthistorie på Københavns Universitet og er ph.d. fra Institut for Nordiske Studier og Sprogvidenskab på Københavns Universitet. Hendes forskning fokuserer på forholdet mellem kunst, litteratur og naturvidenskab fra 1780 til i dag og har siden 2017 haft fokus på klimakrisen. Hun har været kurator, forfatter og redaktør på en række udstillinger og forskningsbaserede antologier, blandt andet Else Alfelt (ARKEN 2022), From a Grain of Dust to the Cosmos (ARKEN 2020), Jordforbindelser (Faaborg Museum 2018) og Artistic Visions of the Anthropocene North (Routledge 2018).
CHRISTIAN SKOVBJERG JENSEN / leder, Museet for Samtidskunst
Christian Skovbjerg Jensen is director of Museet for Samtidskunst in Roskilde and was previously leader of Inter Arts Center at University of Lund – a cross-disciplinary centre for artistic research, development and collaboration. Museet for Samtidskunst works with contemporary art and the newest artistic expression forms: sound art, performance art, video art, etc. They are working outside the traditional frame of a permanent building and are presenting works inside, outside, physically and digitally.
CHRISTINA LOUISE JØRGENSEN / kurator & kunstfaglig rådgiver
Christina Louise Jørgensen er medansvarlig for projektet Liselund Laboratorium Møn. I 2021/22 mødtes kunstnere og naturvidenskabsfolk gennem 12 kunstneriske nedslag i Liselund Have på Møn. Desuden freelance kunstfaglig rådgiver i Vordingborg Kommune og tidligere leder af Kunsthal 44Møen.
MODERATOR: RIE HAMMER / chefredaktør Iscene
Rie Hammer er chefredaktør på ISCENE.dk og tidligere ansvarshavende redaktør på teatermagasinet Teater1. 2001-2006 var hun anmelder og skribent på gratisavisen Urban og har sideløbende skrevet stykker for børn og unge. Rie Hammer er formand for Foreningen Danske Teaterjournalister, formand for Forenede Kritikere samt juryformand for Årets Reumert.
PERSPECTIVES
EMILY ELIZA SCOTT / Assistant Prof., University of Oregon (US)
Emily Eliza Scott’s research focuses on art and design practices that engage pressing (political) ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. More broadly, she is interested in art and environmental justice, art and activism, critical approaches to the built environment, visual cultures of nature, land-based art from the 1960s-present, institutional critique, and the capacity of art to produce non-instrumental forms of sensing and knowing.
She has coedited three publications, including: The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, edited with TJ Demos and Subhankar Banerjee, and Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, edited with Kirsten Swenson. At present, she is developing a monograph on contemporary art that tracks environmental violence as it is writ into land, air, and water. Before entering academia, Scott spent nearly a decade as a National Park Service ranger in Utah and Alaska.
https://design.uoregon.edu/directory/history-of-art-architecture-faculty/all/escott2
ANNETTE ARLANDER / Artist & Researcher
Annette Arlander is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, one of the pioneers of Finnish performance art and a trailblazer of artistic research. At present, she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts University of the Arts Helsinki with the artistic research project Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees.
Performing landscape is the overall theme for her artistic practice, which recently is focused on vegetation, especially trees, and often involves site-specific work, performances for camera, recorded speech, video installations and various experiments concerning the environment, and which takes place in the border zone between performance art, media art and environmental art.
NIKOLAJ SCHULTZ / Sociologist, ph.d., University of Copenhagen
Nikolaj Schultz is a sociologist, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Copenhagen, where he is currently finishing his thesis. With late French philosopher Bruno Latour he is the author of Mémo sur la nouvelle classe écologique (Éditions La Découverte, 2022), in English On the Emergence of an Ecological Class (Polity Books 2022), translated into 10 languages. He is also the author of Mal de Terre (Éditions Payot, 2022), forthcoming in 5 languages such as English with the title Land Sickness (Polity Books, 2023) and in Danish Landsyge (Gyldendal, 2023).
Talk: On Ecology, Affects and Aesthetics
How come we are constantly bombarded with information about the unfolding, climatic catastrophe, but ecological mobilization is so limited? How come so many agree that climate change is the most important problem of our times, but Green parties around Europe all struggle to get over the electoral threshold? In this brief presentation, Danish sociologist Nikolaj Schultz suggests that one way to understand that the political passions in no way are on par with the impending disaster, is that the ecologists have failed to engage seriously the cultural struggle for ideas; a struggle that one cannot neglect when trying to accumulate political affects and mobilize people for action.
Fotos: Lotus Lykke Skov / Thomas G. Bagge / hello!earth / Metropolis / Madeleine Kate McGowan / Andreas Strand Renberg / Søren Meisner / Mette Aakjær