Seances with Materials

A landscape of performative sculptures with and by Karen Lynne Bjerknesli, Malin Bülow, Solveig Styve Holte, Mold, Anne Oortwijn, Andreas Hald Oxenvad, Plants, Plastics, Sara Rönnbäck, Daniel Slåttnes, Stone, Glass Carafes and Water.

In the project we are playing with the thought that materials have an active impact on our art-production. We choose to view our surroundings so to allow the materials to have a will of their own, by that we give the materials the possibility to express themselves together with us.

During the process we have collaborated with a shaman and scientists, each with different approaches to the idea of materials as something with a will of its own. We are used to see verbal language as the highest form of communication. If we slow down and listen, communication exist in many forms; a play with the whole sensory apparatus where smell, taste, touch, hearing and sight interfere with each other.

In our research we have been intrigued by François Laplantine’s Choreographic model, a way to understand the materials as agents that transform us as much as we transform them.

“Kairos is the instant in which I am no longer with others in a relationship of mere coexistence but where I begin to be disrupted and transformed by them. Whereas in a topographical approach we take, we seize, we appropriate an object, in a choreographic approach, and more precisely in the time of kairos, there is no longer an object that can be regarded as a radical outside” François Laplantine in ”The life of the Senses” (2015)

In our process we have worked within the repetitive form of cycles, the practice of coming back to the materials and doing an action over and over again. Through this our perception of the materials dissolves, rhythms appears and new relationships are created.

The project is supported by Atelier Hotel Pro Forma and Arts Council Norway. Special thanks to Secret Hotel and Labitat, Copenhagen.

8  – 13 December 2015