Curators
Eva Bakkeslett (NO)
Artist/CURATOR
Eva Bakkeslett is an artist, curator and cultural activist. Through her work, she conveys connections between nature and culture as a living organism. Communication across species boundaries, bacterial cultures and fermentation as a process and metaphor is central to her work and disseminated in the form of socially engaged and inclusive projects. Her work provides insight into poetic, sensory and transformative processes where new perspectives are revealed and materialised. Eva is curating The Conference of the Birds with Ulrika Jansson.
Ulrika Jansson (SE)
Artist/CURATOR
Ulrika Jansson’s artistic practice is based on the meeting between place, human and ecology. The artworks are multi-part in different media presented in audiovisual installations, often both indoors and outdoors. They are expressed as sculpture and stop-motion film, where plant material and natural phenomena are brought to life, into sound works with mind-expanding techniques that enable contact with more-than-human forms of consciousness. Jansson initiates and participates in interdisciplinary projects with the aim of using artistic approaches to make global ecological problems more tangible in a local context together with other disciplines.
www.ulrikajansson.com
Ulla Taipale (FI)
CURATOR
Ulla Taipale is Finnish curator and artist who works internationally. She is specially interested in enhancing cultural and ecological biodiversity through art & science interventions, and in building bridges between art and science communities, facilitating dialogue between artists, creators, scientists, and the general public. She has a BSc in Environmental Engineering and an MA in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Finland. She works currently as Art&Science curator of Climate Whirl Art program at INAR / University of Helsinki.
www.capsula.fi
melliferopolis.net
www.theotherside.fi
www.climatewhirl.fi
Oleg Koefoed (DK)
Action philosopher/CURATOR
Oleg Koefoed is a multidisciplinary ‘actionist’ studying and playing with how to raise human awareness toward regenerative relations with each other and the worlds they inhabit. After having co-created units working with culture and transdisciplinarity, sustainability, and urban nature, he now leads the Center for Vitalism and Regenerative Transformation, based in Copenhagen. His approach involves co-creating sites for learning, action-philosophical research, commoning through conversations, writings, and listening, as well as training of organisations and leaders in the public and private sectors.
Artists, researchers & advisors
David Rothenberg (US)
David Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He makes music live with the sounds of nature, records music with other species, and writes books and makes films about the process. His books and recordings in the field of interspecies music include Why Birds Sing on birds, Thousand Mile Song on whales, and Bug Music on insects. These works have been translated into many foreign languages and have been the subject of documentary films and radio programs in many countries, including Finland, Germany, France, Denmark, the UK and the United States.
Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth (FI/NO)
Hjorth & Ikonen have collaborated since 2011 on publications and projects including Eyes as Big as Plates (ongoing). Starting out in 2011 studying folkloric explanations to natural phenomenons, the ongoing collaborative series Eyes as Big as Plates has evolved into a continual search for modern human’s belonging to nature. With the goal of combining the powers of art, science and activism, the Norwegian-Finnish artist duo is increasingly portraying people who are actively engaged in the climate emergency discourse, exploring the potential of art to propel actionable system change.
Christoph Matt (AU)
Christoph Matt is an Austrian eco-social designer and founder of the internationally awarded Studio Matt. A nomadic studio for sustainable design with a focus on the living environment and social issues, currently based in Vienna. The projects and works are always dedicated to the interplay of planet earth, the human and more-than-human.
Laura Winge (DK)
Laura Winge is a visual artist and design anthropologist PhD. Her practice-based research frequently centers on codesign as ways of engaging, connecting and exploring dialogues with humans and others, sites and environmental networks.
www.laurawinge.dk
Andris Fågelviskare (SE)
Self taught birdwhisperer who imitates 130+ bird species from all over the world. Andris is a bird and nature activist and continues his journey to teach about the importance of listening and acting mindfully as humans on this multi-species earth.Andris is a spokesperson for the birds and has performed his songs on numerous different media.
Karoliina Lummaa (FI)
Karoliina Lummaa is a postdoctoral researcher specialised in literary studies and environmental humanities. Currently, she is affiliated with the University of Turku and to the independent BIOS Research Unit. Lummaa’s publications include research articles and co-edited anthologies on ecocriticism and posthumanism. She is the author of two monographs focusing on Finnish bird poetry and bird cultures.
Maria Matantseva (RU)
Maria Matantseva is an ornithologist, PhD, working at the Institute of Biology, Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences. She has participated in many projects on bird behaviour, ecology, trends in numbers, and conservation.
ib.krc.karelia.ru
Thomas Holm Carlsen (NO)
Thomas is a researcher at NIBIO at Tjøtta (Nordland) and has a degree in biology in terrestrial ecology from NTNU, Trondheim. Thomas has worked with eider ducks and the culture of collecting eider down since 2007. He has led several Nordic cooperation projects regarding the unique eider tradition and has lived and worked with eider ducks in Iceland for two years (2013-2015). From 2016 to date, he has monitored Eivind’s eider colony on Selvær by capturing, tagging, measuring and putting on loggers (GLS technology) for the registration of migratory routes in the winter.
Thomas has mapped species, vegetation types and habitat types both in Norway and in Iceland for 21 seasons. He has worked in various projects such as management plans, impact assessments, habitat type and vegetation type mapping, vulnerability analyses and monitoring. He has good species knowledge in botany, game (especially birds), insects, as well as some knowledge in moss, fungi and lichen.
Maiken Vibe Bauer (DK)
Maiken Vibe Bauer is a sound artist and researcher based in Copenhagen. MVB holds a M.Sc in Chemistry and M.sc. in Cultural Encounters and has been working with sound, field recordings and sonic practices since 2008. In her work MVB explores how sounds shape our world, how we listen and how sonic experiences can open up spaces for attentiveness, sensing and relating to the living world. Taking point of departure in meticulous field recordings, archival sounds and scientific data she investigates the often complex and unnoticed sounds, and nonhuman voices that surrounds us.
Alongside her own practice she collaborates and co-creates regularly with other artists, performers, choreographers, scientists and researchers. MVBs works span from multi-channel compositions, installations, curated listening spaces, performative sound walks to more documentary forms such as archives, registrants and audio essays.
Nora S. Vaage (NO)
Nora S. Vaage is a philosopher and scholar of art and media studies, with a PhD in philosophy of science and ethics. From this interdisciplinary perspective she writes and teaches on topics at the intersection between culture, society, and technology. She has for many years focused on bio- and eco art and biohacking. Her recent research focuses on the tensions of care and environmental media.
Nora is associate professor at NTNU and Nord University, and Lead Researcher at NOBA: Norwegian BioArt Arena. She leads the work package Experiential Soils within the research project Anthropogenic Soils: Recuperating Human-Soil Relationships on a Troubled Planet (2022-28). She occasionally works as a curator.
Sergey Simonov (RU)
Sergey Simonov is an ornithologist, PhD of Laboratory for Zoology, Institute of Biology, Karelian Research Centre, Russian Academy of Sciences. During his 12 years of work experience, he has coordinated and successfully realised series of research projects supported by different organizations. Simonov uses traditional methods and actively implements the interdisciplinary approach in ornithology. He also collaborates with artists in art & science projects.
www.krc.karelia.ru
Becoming Species (DK)
Becoming Species is a performative, activist collective based in Copenhagen, exploring and criticizing the current climate emergency and biodiversity crisis on the limit between rebellion, protest and inspiration for future alternatives.
Gylleboverket: Etta Säfve & Jona Elfdahl (SE)
Gylleboverket is an artist group that works with site-specific installations, performance, sound, video and ritual investigations. They work with built-up worlds, often of natural materials, myths, rites and stage installations. They also run the platform Gylleboverket – a platform for contemporary art, film and permaculture, where they explore artistic strategies and permaculture as a tool to understand what it is to be human and work in the world with care for the earth, the more-than-human and each other.
Great Cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo sinensis)
Seabird
Us cormorants are a bird species living in most parts of the planet’s marine areas and other waterways. We like living in big colonies together with folks of our kind. Sometimes other sea birds live together or near to our colonies, and we support each other’s lives. In Finland we mostly occupy outer and rocky sea islands where no one else likes living. We enjoy the open skies and the fresh sea breeze and mostly eat small fish such as perches and roaches which we catch by diving.
Nikolaj Noel Christensen (DK)
Nikolaj is educated in educational science with a specialisation in management, natural philosophy and Education for Sustainable Development (UBU). His gaze is sharply focused on the space between nature policy and sustainability throughout society, including in relation to educational policy issues. His great interest in natural politics locally and nationally has resulted in a commitment to the Danish Ornithological Society regarding the political discussion on urban development in Copenhagen.
A commitment that has also secured him a large and strong network across the green agenda. When Nikolaj does not participate in the nature policy and sustainable agenda, time passes mainly with life with birds and the dissemination of birds in many contexts.
Aleksi Lehikoinen (FI)
Aleksi Lehikoinen is an Academy Research Fellow and curator at LUOMUS and adjunct professor (Ecology and evolutionary biology, University of Helsinki). He has led his own research group, the Helsinki Lab of Ornithology since 2013, and he has nine years of experience of independent scientific research.
Nana Francisca Schottländer (DK)
Nana Francisca Schottländer is a transdisciplinary artist working with choreography, visual arts and performance as practice-based research exploring collaborative creation and intimate dialogues between human and more-than-human worlds and bodies
Pernilla Ljungkvist (SE)
Pernilla Ljungkvist’s work is conceptual with performance, text, sound and participatory processes as the main material, along with influences from various mind-expanding practices butoh, meditation and yoga. Her artistic practice moves in the borderland between social experiments, pseudo science and often examines existential issues based on personal stories.
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Eider duck (Somateria Molissima)
SEABIRD
The eider is a diving duck that lives in polar regions of the northern hemisphere. For centuries our species have collaborated with humans. Human archaeologists have found traces of our species in Stone Age landfills and mapped on rock carvings in northern Norway. Remains of our down have also been found as duvet filling from later times, including the Oseberg find, dated to around the year 800.
Humans help us build our nests and look after us during the nesting period. In return we generously share our soft down when our chicks have hatched. We have had this collaboration for thousands of years all along the coast of Norway, the Barents Sea and Iceland. Sadly, in the last 50 years humans have largely stopped this tradition. Because of the lack of food and undisturbed places for us to live and breed, our numbers have plummeted. We are now only 20% of the population we were 40 years ago.
www.npolar.no/