Research - Utmarken
Current roles and responsibilities
I am currently an Artist/Researcher at the Borgholm Centre for Contemporary Art and Research (BCCAR)on the island of Öland, Sweden. My work at BCCAR involves developing a programme for critacal art and thinking through art on Öland. The landscape of Öland is unique, being Europe’s largest limestone plateau. In 2009, I initiated the project of ‘Utmarken’ in order for artists to enter a natural hazel outland. During this time there have been a number of manifestations in the Utmarken whereby artists (including myself) have responded to the character of the wood. It was as a result of this practice that I developed an interest in forest floor and its constituent of dead-wood, that which has fallen from the trees but provides vital nourishment. In 2021 I began to develop an ontology of Deadwood which led to me writing the Deadwood Letters and will form an important communicator for my proposal. In a specific development I am working as a researcher in the project LEVA (Landskapsekologisk Verksamhets Ansats) which has involved site related works and investigations on Öland. I am interested in transdisciplinary research working with biologists and architects. This has given me insights into the challenges of land sustainability and how buildings can be made to respect the landscape site. Architecture itself is part of the ecology. In the light of this I am developing plans for a building made of recycled and recyclable materials. My art practice involves installation and performance. I like the spontaneity of actions and I have made a number of impromptu performances to show how deadwood can be transformed into a media, by movement and embodied practice. I see this work as communal in the sense that I can allow for the handling of materials and that, by touch and voice - the recital of a poem to deadwood, for instance, by addressing a piece of the deadwood material, brings life to an inert matter. I provide a context or feeling for the personal narratives of those who attend the performance. My most recent performance, ‘Can You Lend Me a Plank?’ premiered in March this year at BCCAR. The performance had performed music sound. I like to work with sound, it draws in those around and I can enlist collaborators to help with this aspect of the work
CV highlights:
In 2022, I studied for an MA in Design and Change at Linnaeus University in Vaxjö with Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter and Ola Stahl. On that course I explored the dance moves taken by Deadwood in such a way that I could be informed by Deadwood as my own teacher. I wrote a number of letters to Deadwood and presented two performances, one at ARTWRK Factory and artist-run gallery in the industrial city of Västerås in May, 2022 and then later in Växjö as part of the course assessment. I showed a documentary photograph from my performance at Konst Sydosten United at Kalmar Konstmuseum in 2022. My studies in Växjö had been preceded by an MA in Art and Process, Under C.I.T. Cork,Ireland (2017). Studying in Ireland has been a crucial part in getting close to a grounded practice, I began to appreciate the raw substance and material and informed a more physical art-culture where poetry and visual art were often interconnected. Artists that I met then broadened my network of friends and colleagues. In 2020, I had a residency and showed work with Ullinn Art Centre, West Cork, Ireland. In 2017, i shaped the exhibition Mittlandskogens mitt which has been an ongoing project in which resulted in the exhibition with the same name, installations, site visits performances and workshops independently but also in dialogue with the Kalmar Art Museum .https://www.kalmarkonstmuseum.se/exhibition/mittlandsskogens-mitt/ and at the old School house of Yellowbox in Sättra on Öland
In 2016-2018 I was invited to take part In the Experimental Cultural Heritage Project Research based at LNU University of Kalmar. My role was to work with performative and sculptural processes and lead artists and archaeologists to find common ground and make site related works. In 2007 I created Steam Studio, funded through SKART (curatorial projekt) and Culture Irland. This became a small research platform which had steam steamed from a woodburner placed 2,5 meters under the unit. In the winter the water that was steamed into the glasscube and with my body temperature melted the ice whilst working there. This resulted in a transparency and a non-transparency to the surrounding environments and this set the parameters for being present in the landscape and to be a continuum and not a result of a process. The steam studio work lasted for about 10 years and was eventually taken down. But the work in the nearby vicinity led me to working with Utmarken as a wider concept for being in the place of research and here I have become alert to the microbiome and the microsystems being connected to the forest floor. 2012 - Present. Utmarken, Öland, with this place we make invites and I want to draw Alternatives for Artists at a Hazelwood swamp.
What drives me?
The drive is a movement toward a hidden knowledge that for years has lodged in our landscapes and our bodies and to use that knowledge to address a historic and continuing manipulation and misuse of our landscape and bodies that has resulted in a division, a gap in knowledge which must be rediscovered. This is not just a desire to be in a process of creating and making singular or isolated artworks, but towards a way of living and being that wants to find its place in the world. This can be done by small gestures, it can be done in silence and by shifting things slowly. It can also be manifested through an art practice. This practice wants to create a ‘living’ room for alternative knowledge that is not embedded in one dominant narrative -in as much a system by default - but, at least, a joint taking on of a radical otherness that we rarely encounter in today's knowledge production. A place where we can talk, work, make various and manifold things around and in relation to multiple complexities and issues without necessarily trying to fix everything.
4. Short paragraph on future aspirations including reason for the study:
I have started and engaged in works and writings around how deadwood, the wood which covers the forest floor, decomposes from its source and makes for a much more entangled substance. This substance has a complex regenerative purpose for a land that cannot be replaced by something else, as it's not only material but a living system. Here it's not about following an individual species or habitat, it's much more about underlining a complex system that flows over and through the ideas and representations into a new form of subject, a hyper-subject of transformational matter of time and memory. so when we understand the world in theory and philosophy we can as well understand it through connectivity, the unspoken and the unknown. This is where deadwood will be placed and will speak for those who do not have that voice; it will give an understanding of life as well as death, energies and complexity in a forest. It will enter areas of practice that will give other outcomes than a product and a new knowledge, the opposite. It will find contradictions and opposites and order and chaos complexities. It will go back in time and forward and be present in a mulch of substance. It will decompose the order of our logic as we speak and seek knowledge through
A PHD gives something new to both myself and to others, something that was always there but we forgot to value it and get to know it; Deadwood. Through sharing this knowledge, this knowledge has taken me 15 years in and around the forests of Öland to feel. I want to share the Dance/the movement.
Coming Research
Deadwood Dance: Knowing Through Substance.
Aim
How can current urban-derived systems relating to knowledge production reach and incorporate the knowledge and tradition of rural people who have a fecund and practical experience of the land on which they live and work?
What role does language play in preventing the development of a more holistic and sustainable approach to interdisciplinary knowledge production in this context?
What role can a site-responsive performance and making practice contribute to previously unexplained connections between these different ways of (framing) knowing?
My goals
I aim to pursue the study of Deadwood by ontological methods and by conducting a series of initiatives of on-site research including performative and documentary activities in some rural, and/or, post-urban locations in Sweden. These actions and manifestations are not about finding and arguing for one truth, it is more about searching for a core, a channel of intuitive knowing: to sense a place and to understand certain keys of complexity and biodiversity. I want to challenge knowledge-production as a format that does not reach those people with a deep knowledge of the land.
Inspiration to my research and reading
Much knowledge production is centered in and around our major cities and, therefore, much knowledge comes from an urban perspective. Ecosystems in forests are pre-existing and very complex advanced systems that have little in common with built environments, and much of their complexity arguably cannot be fully understood or experienced by humans, as we are embedded in our own perspective and have our own gaze. We cannot know the forest as it is, in itself. In terms of new research into art-ecology, I refer to the naturalist, Susan Simmard, culture theorist and critic Jane Bennett. These women were important in the development of the Deadwood ontology. Their writings gave me the confidence to trust my intuition about the concept.To address this ecologization, this project will draw upon a range of other disciplinary contexts and influences, including: ontology, what the essence of Deadwood is. Time and durational practice (philosophical perspectives including time and materiality) plus the difference between immanent now-time (event) and the time-space continuum as experienced in the ‘natural’ landscape.
I will also be interested in current bio-science and hyper-subjectivity in terms of actual situations in practice performance. This means to access and reflect art-writing, already present in the Deadwood Letters. Increasingly art and writing are drawn into a transdisciplinary mode as art-language has modified itself to the needs of current ecology.
Baruch Spinoza has played a very central role in the departure of my work as I was introduced to the Ethics in 2016 at a conference at the Burren College of Art in Ireland. Spinoza raised the question of substance as real energy and movement to the extent of the bodily limits being redrawn, in a sense, to a mind over matter paradigm. From this moment my work has had a place where it is constantly in communication and movement from an ultimate state of change in my immediate thinking. Therefore I am interested in writers and thinkers also in some respects formed by the Spinozan genealogy, such as the Norwegian ecologist Arne Naas, who translated the Spinozan idea of substance into his concept of ‘deep ecology’.The artists who have also taken on the role where they explore ‘otherness’ interest me most. I am interested in those artists of the becoming-subject of ethical ecology, such as Palestinian artist, forager, cook, Jumana Manna and Forensic Architecture - whose work I saw in Copenhagen. I have also been studying the situation of the Sapmi people of northern Scandinavia, the only ur-folk of Europe. I visited their center in Tärnaby in February to be invited by a Sapmi center there and to be introduced to their politics of now, this related to my sound memory of deer herds running across the mountain. They are in the process of decolonization, but it is a difficult work, there are lots of contradictions. The work of post-colonial writers is important to me. I strive for the state of free possibility which is what the work of decolonisation undertakes. A key that I will be reading in my essay for me is Charlotte Bydler, Decolonial or Creolized Commons, (Bydler,2017) as this essay seeks to index ethical ecology with decolonization. To sum up: the key areas that inform my project are: dominant technologies, challenged by Simard et al. Ethical ecology: ontology: Spinoza, ( Heidegger), Arne Nass.
Metoder
The work will depart from Utmarken, Two acres of land that is considered an ‘outland’, a non profitable land that has a small wetland as a part of it. It is a marshland that has mainly hazel trees. In the tax office paper it is considered wasteland and has therefore no value in profitable terms. This will be the driver of the project. All my research will be coordinated by Utmarken
It will also depart from the Centre of BCCAR in Borgholm where I have been instrumetal in curating exhibits science 2027.
the work will take shape of:
Art writing
performance/ embodied movement work
Dance deadwood dance tools of practice
logic of forest floor
collaborative site related works
Exhibitions
Sculpture / rooms of architecture / rhythm work
embodied practice / Movement
Time
First Year: earth layers and performative method: deconstruct / sorrow / Life/ death Performance work. Program Approval and contextual review process.
Second Year: Biological method / artistic methods / live writing / Art writing collaboration in laboratories and site related work. Confirmation of candidature process.
Collaborative works with my sister Kristina Kvamme and invited Artists
Third Year: The knowing and the unknowing: a forgotten practice, ritual and movement of earth, trust and new findings. Completion of written element and submission.
Bydler,Charlotte (2017) ‘Decolonial or Creolized Commons? Sami Duodji in the Expanded Field’, in Sami Art and Aesthetics, Svein Aamold ed. Aarhus University pp 141-162.
Brizuela, N, Bryan-Wilson, J (2022) ‘Seeds of Change on the Art of Jumana Manna’, Artforum, vol 61, no. 2, pp 146-153.
Mignolo, D. W., Walsh, C. E.,(2018) On Decoloniality:Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, Duke University Press.’
Röstlund, L.,(2022) Skogslandet, en granskning, Forum, Stockholm.
Texts I want to return to:
Ethics- Spinoza
Further:
De-colonising Theory
I am also interested in the way writing as the framing and a core in practice research and how to map the writing itself as way to deconstruct by moving towards knowledges that are more embedded and not recognised in the academic circle but has relevance