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Voice, listening, situated practices and sense of place
I am an artist and researcher based in Stockholm, Sweden. I work transdisciplinary with various media and contexts with a particular interest in listening (see for example the artistic research project Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening). In recent years, I have primarily worked with installations, sonic fictions, performances, and lecture performances.
My work is rooted in both contemporary art and performing arts and several installations have been co-produced with Teatr Weimar in Malmö. I often use
fictionalized situations and set-ups together with sound. Voice
and time are vital ingredients, as well as the situation at hand
and what you as visitor bring into it.
The stories told, fictional and documentary, are related to what
you see, but also the situation you find yourself in while listening.
Voice and vision, or lack of vision, are thus used to activate specific
perceptions and preconceptions.
Collaborative projects are an important part of my artistic practice
and I see them as temporary universities where new approaches and
activities can be tested and specific topics explored. In the two-year-project "Monument
for the Masses", for example, made in collaboration with Po
Hagström, narrative strategies as well as sampling and
recontextualization of already existing material were used on a
large scale. Here we took an existing proposal for a monument in
Estonia, altered it in substantial ways and presented our re-make
as a counter-monument. Our proposal was used as a point of departure
for mapping stories and rituals surrounding art in public space.
Rather than focusing on the values and virtues monuments are said
to symbolize, we explored the misunderstandings, conflicting relations
and stories associated with them. Another example is “To
Mushroom”, made in collaboration with Anna Högberg.
We produced a collection of maps that explored social systems and
different types of public spaces from an ecological perspective.
Concepts such as social capital, exclusion, and democracy were examined
– this in order to discuss more or less invisible social values
in relation to urban planning.
Together with the film maker and director Karin Wegsjö, I run Nu-institutet [The
Now Institute], which is an independent and non-profit culture
organization. We have among other things initiated collaborations and international exchange projects with artists and film makers in China, and made the short fiction film
"Happiness, a Five-Year Plan" together, which was shot in China
and Sweden.
In 2005 I started SQUIDproject.net together with the artist Katja
Aglert. "SQUID" is an ever-expanding, online archive
of texts written by cultural producers from different countries,
but also a framework for offline activities such as readings, artist
talks, screenings, etc. Between 2008 and 2013 Martijn
van Berkum [NL] was a third project manager.
Research
Since Jan 2018 I'm affiliated researcher with the Posthumanities Hub, and since 1 May, 2019 I'm also Research Engineer for the Hub at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
In my PhD Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening (Lund University, 2017) I explored entangled issues such as multispecies relations, interspecies communication, and the intra-action of bodies, environs and technology. It focused on how sound and listening, in a visually dominated culture, could mediate new relationships with the more-than-human. I depart from the archival material of American neurophysiologist John C. Lilly, who in the 1950s and 1960s conducted controversial scientific experiments with dolphins, as well as on himself.
In my current work I explore and develop situated modes of storying and listening at particular sites and with special attention to soil (human-soil relations, multispecies soil communities, and soil care). My research is situated at the intersection of art, gardening, feminist materialist philosophy and the emerging field of environmental (post)humanities. Mixed methods from place-based, process oriented and participatory art, as well as sound art, are used in combination with non-representational theory and posthumanist methodologies that seeks to transform our way of thinking, storying, being in, and caring for the world.
Theatre
Since 1992 I have also made works for the stage.
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