MAKE A GARDEN BEFORE YOU BUILD A HOUSE
is a participatory work carried out in the intermediate space between the buildings in Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. Making the garden was an experiment in ecology and all the questions that arise when you for example adapt five Indian runner ducks or in other ways intervene with a place of growth. Can we, as Silvia Federici questions, think of gardens as far more than a food source and instead as centers of sociality, resistance, knowledge production? Can they become sites of experimental ecologies and ways of thinking with a place? The work was supported generously by participants, the JvE Academie as well as local farmers and friends.
Make a Garden Before you Build a House was presented at the Open Studios exhibition at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, June 2021.
WHERE TO DRAW A POINT THAT WOULD MARK THE BEGINNING?
Digital archive and interactive resource around the making of a garden. Commissioned by The Jan Van Eyck Academy 2021. Programming by designer and artist Raoul Audouin. Check the work here
RECIPIENTS
Video work for the digital symposium Urgency Intensive hosted by Jan Van Eyck Academie w. Soft Protest Digest, voiceover by Marie Caye, music by Arvid.
7 min video with sound, 2021. Watch the video here
SOFT PROTEST DIGEST
(2018 to 2022) was an Art Collective co-founded together with Robin Bantigny and Jérémie Rentien-Lando. Central to our work was an experimentation with the meal as a container for public debate as well as engagements with actors in agricultural systems through performance, sound, graphics, dinners, installations and public gatherings. The projects are published through a self-generated wikipedia platform and several podcasts.
THIS POTENT SMELL THIS STRANGE TASTE
document an attempt to locate sites where the collective memory of Stödvarfjordur’s fishing culture has embedded itself, slipped away, become warped, preserved, re-imagined, and slowly fermented. Even evisceration leaves a trace: the strange somatic slime, the excretions of site-specific history, necessary residues of ephemerality. And how can ritual and corporeal gestures, acts which are ephemeral in nature, facilitate such remembering? To begin understanding these inquiries, Nickie worked with a traditional fermentation process to create a sauce from fish guts – known as garum – and involved local school children in the methodology of ritual. Text adapted from exhibition text written by Kristina Stallvik and Nickie Sigurdsson, 2022.
35 mm stills of the performance inside an abandoned fish farm structure in Stödvarfjordur, presented as a video work for the group show ‘A thing shared’ at Automat Gallery, Philadelphia, US, 2022.
LANDING
Landing is a publication that brings together reflections on agricultural practices, the poetics of land management and shepherding, as well as the shifting dialectics between rural and urban, human and more-than-human. Featuring contributions from participants of the Inland Academy 2022 and a wider network of collaborators, printed with Lumbung Press, and published by INLAND. Edited by Katy Dammers, Grace Denis, Jean Ni, and Jens Strandberg. The publication was launched at Foodculturedays Biennale, Vevey, 2023.
image 2-4 shows spreads from my essay contribution: Cover Cropping - The biosemiotics of Recovery.
image 5-7 shows excerpts from an essay contribution in collaboration w. Kristina Stallvik: Forecasting.
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ACT 1: THE WHEELHOUSE
Interested in the activation of collective memory, the exhibition investigates the capacity of subjective, sensorial ‘data’ to trace the relationships between icelandic fishing communities, non-human agents, and the conditions of our contemporary extractivist paradigm. In correlation with the museums location - the Marshall House at Reykjavik’s Old Harbor - ACT 1 is composed of publicly accessible live footage captured by the Faxaflóahafnir Associated Icelandic Ports’ webcams. Reflecting on these histories and the cyborg ‘memory’ produced by harbour webcams, the exhibition also encouraged a collective writing practice inviting visitors to participate in a retelling of the events engendered by a fundamental change in fishing legislation due to the Fisheries Management Act in 1990, which legalized privatization of the commons. Text adapted from exhibition text written by Kristina Stallvik and Nickie Sigurdsson, 2022.
Video still from the installation at Limbo, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik.
w. Kristina Stallvik, 2023.
ACT 1: FORECASTING
The publication is an auto fictional text produced for the exhibition: The Wheelhouse at Limbo (The Living Art Museum) Reykjavik, 2023. The text takes the form of field notes written by an imagined collective narrator – participants of a small artist residency established inside of a defunct fish gutting factory – over the course of one week. Text, editing and design w. Kristina Stallvik. Printed by Colorama, Berlin, 2023, self published 1st edition of 40, typeface by Paul Bernhard.
