Curators
Eva Bakkeslett (NO)
Artist/Curator
Eva Bakkeslett is an artist, filmmaker and curator exploring the potential for social change through aesthetic perspectives and gentle actions.
Her socially engaged practice often combines film, participatory events and workshops.
www.evabakkeslett.com
She creates spaces and experiences that challenge our thinking and unravel new narratives, that brings our attention to the patterns that connect us to the earth as a living organism. Eva shows, lectures and performs her work worldwide and her films have been screened in numerous film festivals and art events. In 2009 her film Alchemy w as shown at MoMA, New York. She co-curated the interdisciplinary event Gentle Actions a t Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2010 and recently co-curated the program Repair for ROM for Art of Architecture in Oslo. Eva has an MA in Art & Ecology from Dartington College of Art in England. She lives on Engeløya in North Norway where she now has created an Artist Residency program and studio to make a platform for aesthetic collaborations and enquiry founded in ecological and interconnected thinking and working.
Ulrika Jansson (SE)
Artist/Curator
Ulrika Jansson is a Swedish artist, educator and curator based in Göteborg. In her site-specific practice she inquires how we, by engaging with stories, history, values, materials and ecology at specific locations, can gain an insight into interconnections between other creatures, people, places and times.
ulrikajansson.b-cms.se
Her public art works often engage with and accommodate birds, bats and solitary bees. She engages in and initiates interdisciplinary collaborative art projects exploring socio-ecological relationships, such as in Cultural Adaptations, a Creative Europe project led by Creative Carbon Scotland 2019-2021. She has taught and lectured at institutions including Konstfack, Uniarts Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts and Stockholm Culture Council.
Ulla Taipale (Fi)
Curator
Ulla Taipale is Finnish curator and researcher 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.
www.capsula.fi
melliferopolis.net
She has often collaborated with biological research stations and botanic gardens. Her two ongoing artistic research projects are related to urban honeybees and to forest and atmospheric sciences. She has a BSc in Environmental Engineering and an MA in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art from Aalto University, Finland. She is art&science curator at INAR / University of Helsinki at Climate Whirl art program.
Oleg Koefoed (D)
Researcher /
Co-Curator
Oleg Koefoed (D) is a philosopher devoted to opening up the art of philosophy to the interwoven complexity of the world. The concept of Action-Philosophy is one of the cores of the agency Growing Pathways (that Koefoed founded with Kajsa Paludan in 2016).
www.growing-pathways.com
This “nature relations agency” uses methods combining artistic approaches, philosophy and cultural mapping, with digital participation and network building. Through these tools, the agency assists partners and clients in intertwining strategy with biodiversity, spatial and ecology support actions. (http://growing-pathways.com) Koefoed is also engaged in research and writing, through action-research partnerships and through Copenhagen Business School.
Artists / researchers / advisors
Karoliina Lummaa (FI)
Postdoctoral Researcher
Karoliina Lummaa (FI) 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.
David Rothenberg (US)
Professor of Philosophy and Music
David Rothenberg (US) 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)
Artists
Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth have collaborated since 2011 on publications and projects including Eyes as Big as Plates (ongoing), The World in London (2012), Time is a ship that never casts anchor (2014–18), Signal, Lights, Connected for the Pyeong Chang Winter Olympics (2018), TEDMED Talk 2020, and Finnskogen Understories (ongoing). Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen received her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2008. Norwegian photographer, artist, and writer Karoline Hjorth received her MA from the University of Westminster (London) in 2009.
Alexandra Buhl(D)
Photographer and video artist
Alexandra Buhl (b. 1976) uses a combination of documentary and constructed material – video, sound, photography and digital collages – in a study of the crossroads between man’s linguistic and bodily encounter with the world. In addition, she is known for her experimental drawings with hair / hair strands. In collaboration with Co’Libri Bogbinderi, she has created the award-winning book Hair Drawings, and together with composer Ellen Birgitte Rasmussen and performance artist Nana Francisca Schottländer the project Inseparable Together.
Alexandra will explore the coexistence of birds and humans in its immediate environment (Nørrebro etc.), put in relation to the zoological museum’s stuffed birds: On the one hand, she will in audio and video sequences capture the volatile, ordinary birds that surround us in our everyday life in the city, e.g. injuries and seagulls living off our waste. On the other hand, with photographs taken with a macro optic, she will go very close to the museum’s immobile bird collection. Including both stuffed versions of everyday birds, but also of bird species that have been in Denmark before, but which are now extinct here. Her goal is in this way to investigate the mutual influence that exists between bird and human (life and death) and the nature we usually take for granted.
Maria Matantseva (RU)
PhD Biology
Maria Matantseva (RU) 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.
Nikolaj Noel Christensen (D)
Educational Scientist
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.
http://nikolajnoel.com/about-us/
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.
Thomas Holm Carlsen (NO)
Biologist
Thomas is a researcher at NIBIO at Tjøtta (Nordland) and has a degree in biology in terrestrial ecology from NTNU, Trondheim. 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.
https://www.nibio.no/en/employees/thomas-holm-carlsen
In addition to habitat mapping and the management planning, Thomas has worked with eider ducks and the culture of collecting eider ducks since 2007. He has led several Nordic co-operation 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.
Maiken Vibe Bauer (D)
Soundartist
Maiken’s work ranges from audio installations, multichannel works and video to documentary forms such as audio essays and archives. She explores how places and their stories resonate; in memory through narratives and various materials such as manifestations and acoustic territories. Sound is the primary medium, but she explores how our senses resonate with and on the environment, and how these rhythmic conditions negotiate place; as a constant occurrence – for example on the dammed Lammefjord.
Maiken will focus on Vestamager and the birds that live and stay on selected sites there. Habitats and (urban) landscape are unique, diverse, changeable. It contains rich biodiversity, history and volatility, as well as the opportunity for listening and creative dialogue. Like Lammefjorden, Vestamager is a dammed country, an anthropogenic and historical landscape. It characterizes the intergenerational relationships, whether they are intentional or just arising. Through site-specific field recordings, the significance of the anthropogenic landscape in relation to [bird man], for deeper auditory and territorial connections is investigated. A possible soundscape-based approach to the landscape as an ‘acoustic community’, a symbolic unit created by and within an acoustic space, can lead to processes (eg bird flute workshops) and works, eg a multi-channel work for the landscape and a site-specific sound walk with recordings and archive sound that weaves together with conversations with researchers and ornithologists about accompanying species, genera, anthropogenic landscapes, etc.s and storytelling.
Christoph Matt (AUT)
Communication designer
Christoph Matt is an art director, communication designer, and illustrator born in the mountains and shaped by the Austrian Alps ever since. Christoph is the founder of the Studio Matt, a base camp for environmentally and socially conscious design and ideas currently set up in Gothenburg, Sweden. Inspired by adventures, explorations, and translations in the great outdoors and its vast ecosystems. Keeping a wary eye on the blue planet while working with humans and nature in various parts of the world. Constantly facing emerging issues with rock-solid rucksack principles, more-than-human focus, progressive design practices, and embracing a positive failure culture.
christophmatt.com
instagram.com/christophmatt
Sergey Simonov (RU)
PhD Biology
Sergey Simonov (RU) 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.
Andris Fågelviskare(SE)
Birdwhisperer
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.
Becoming Species (D)
Performance and activist group
Becoming Species focuses on the survival of species and biodiversity by becoming even the same species and giving nature a voice, movement and expression. Our quest to become other species is not rooted in a romantic notion of the goodness of species and nature. It is a study of new perspectives and a critique of the structure and worldview that has created and escalated climate change. Becoming Species consists of 9 members with backgrounds in natural therapy, yoga, activism, dance, teaching, cultural communication, philosophy, performance design, visual arts, literature, astrology.
Performance and activist group Becoming Species will create a performance / workshop on the Becoming Birds process. Each of the participants will turn into a bird. We do not yet know which birds we will become; we explore it in the process and let intuition guide us. We feel our intertwining with the birds. We examine needs, sounds and movements from the bird’s perspective. How does it feel to be a bird? Breaking out of an egg? Having a beak? Having feathers? To be able to fly over the country? How do birds communicate? What environment do they thrive in? How can we create a better environment for the birds? We would like to invite others to join a guided Becoming Birds workshop to experience the process. The performance consists of three parts: a meditation / inner perspective workshop; invitation to participate, and an open dialogue with the participants about their experience and new perspectives on entanglement between birds and humans [the bird-human species].
Laura Winge (D)
Co-design
Laura Winge is a Design Anthropologist and PhD Fellow. She creates co-design processes for others and her own (dialogical) works. Laura focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration and is particularly interested in using stories and other formats such as service travel and documentaries that convey insights and results so that they are useful for further work. She has solved site-specific artistic decorating tasks and exhibits.
In an installation, Laura will reflect on the missing birds and the holes in the sky after them in dialogue with an ornithologist. It will primarily be an aesthetic practice that takes place in one of the ‘nature reserves’ in Copenhagen which are pressured from several sides. The mirror installation is followed by a design anthropological project on coexistence with city birds, e.g “The visitors”. Flocks of storks exposed in Sweden that will be part of the street scene in DK. Haraways Curious Practice / ‘polite visiting’ is examined in conjunction with a design anthropological documentation of coexistence with ‘wild’ birds in the city, urban species, bird’s eye view, bird houses, bird control, flocks of pigeons and carrier pigeons. Outcome can be action-packed dialogues that put birds and humans in connection with each other. A facilitation of connection-creating actions. What happens when we feed the birds we have hired humans to exterminate? The pigeons in the town hall square, the seagulls in the airport, the roosters roaring? Other dialogues …
Gylleboverket: Etta Säfve & Jona Elfdahl (SE)
Performance, video & installation artists
Gylleboverket’s investigations take shape as ritual being, performance, text, sound & video. In The Conference of the Birds, their work is based on questions about place and space, what space we as humans take and what we leave to others. The work is based on deep ecology, where the human being is deeply rooted in and part of the complex web of symbiosis and relationships that we call nature.
We have asked ourselves how we humans have been able to separate ourselves from and push nature out of our lives. And how we have thereby driven predation on the world and displaced other species.
Gylleboverket works in the project with a series of cinematic rituals to leave space for nature on the Koster Islands together with the local population. To set oneself aside to make room for the elusive, for the wild and the repressed.
With a number of residents at Koster, we have, among other things, moved backwards over the pebble ridges of the Nordkoster island. With our work, we have looked for a gap in our presence, an out-of-body emptiness that broadens the space for the world.
Gylleboverket is both an artist group and a platform for contemporary performing arts, art, film and culture based in an old industrial building in the countryside on Österlen in Skåne. Gylleboverket is run by the artists Jona Elfdahl and Etta Säfve.
As an artist group, they work with performance, installations, video works, sound, rites and social sculptures. They also work actively with permaculture – sustainable systems for the earth and humans, including forest gardens, sustainable cultivation techniques and social projects often in collaboration with other artists.
They work site-specifically and cross-border with built-up worlds, often of natural materials, myths, rites and stage installations Through the artistic process, the potential of the poetic to raise contemporary issues is explored. Gylleboverket’s work process is exploratory, longer processes where thematic issues are intertwined. Collaborations, public meetings, analysis of the world around us and themes such as human isolation, normality, our relationship to the world around us and each other are examined in visual and poetic works.
Aleksi Lehikoinen (FI)
Researcher
Aleksi Lehikoinen (FI) 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.
https://www.luomus.fi/en/aleksi-lehikoinen
His research focuses on the effects of environmental changes, such as climate change and human land use changes, on species’ abundances and distributions. Lehikoinen has published 80 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals (e.g. Science and Global Change Biology, h-index 20). At the moment he collaborates with University of Jyväskylä and Finnish Environmental Institute to investigate how climate change and intensive forestry will influence forest bird populations in Finland in the future.
Nikoline Jørgensen(D)
Cultural Communicator
Nikoline is part of the performance collective Becoming Species. In this project, she is the representative of the group, ie a branch of the tree, or a fungal spore in the large mycelium network.
She is a cultural communicator with a dynamic approach to various creative and bodily practices and dissemination.
https://www.instagram.com/nikolinephotos/
Among other things, she has worked with dialogue-based teaching at the Statens Museum for Kunst, as a yoga teacher and as a researcher and organizer at DR. She is educated in Aesthetics and Culture and Media Studies and has several years of experience working with cross-aesthetic projects that weave together multisensory performances and storytelling.
Nana Francisca Schottländer(D)
Artist
Nana will work with landscapes and bird life at Jorddepotet, where she is already engaging on several projects. The landfill is a new land, a land of the future – piled up by excavations from buildings and metro tunnels, it is shaped where there used to be sea, at the tip of Nordhavn. Now it forms the starting point for new life to move into the material stories that are thrown together here. Life moves in, in the form of plants, animals, humans, insects – and birds.
nanafrancisca.wixsite.com/nanafrancisca
It is a material starting point for a future, composed of unmanageable numbers of past. How do bird and human narratives fit into this process? In collaboration with some of the project’s other artists and the birds of the place, NFS will look at the possibility of recreating and embodying a hybrid human-bird creature that can come to life in the Earth Depot’s landscape and become part of its mythology.
The studies of the area form the basis for performance, text, photo and video works, which can be included in the further course of the project. For the past 20 years Nana has worked with hybrids in the intersection between dance, performance, installation and concept art. Her field of work is exploratory and site-specific and always based on the body as a tool and material.
Heli Aaltonen(FI/NO)
Drama/Theatre pedagogue
Heli Aaltonen is puppeteer, storyteller, drama/theatre pedagogue, and scholar in theatre and performance science. Associate Professor in Drama and Theatre in Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Her research interest is connected with green drama, environmental theatre projects, community-based performance and storytelling projects, where the focus is eco-social change. Her speciality is Finno-Ugrian mythology, fairy tales, Runo singing and multilingual storytelling. Heli comes from Turku in Finland.