Tuesday, 3 December, 19h, Common Notions – performance
Thursday, 5 December, 16h, Performative collective reading of Emanuele Coccia’s The Cosmic Garden
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Saturday, 7 December – finissage, 16h, marine biologist Eli Rinde, NIVA, Oslo - lecture followed by open conversation
finishing with Common Notions – performance
Visningsrommet USF is transformed into a relay station or platform in an ongoing negotiation of the forests beneath the surface of the sea. It originates from the project Agential Matter (Invisible Landscapes), coming now to an end as artistic research fellowship at The Art Academy at the former KHiB now Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design at UiB. The work arises from journeys along the coast to pay visits to diverse places, where various interests regarding an undetermined future nurture the observation of algae. It is based on the entanglement of subjectivity with socio-political concerns.
These stays are not only the source of material. They are rather understood as an intervening attention and a care for processes in encounters between algae, bodies and objects, and a want to trace relations and mutual impact. Porosity enables reciprocal shaping and penetration.
The project bears characteristics of the documentary, nevertheless has no linear narrative. The gaze shifts between distanced observation and the experience of intense immersion. Fragments are out of their context, outside of their respective ecologies, out of the laboratory, the landing station or out of the sea, they are displaced, isolated and presented in the gallery space. As much as they are just there, present, they are indexes to another space and another discourse – as elements in the performance, or in the form of an image archive requiring activation to see the lines. The interest lies not in the parts, but between the parts themselves. What happens here is an extension of the journey. The sea is right outside the door.
Some kelp is harvested close to Marsteinen in the south of Sotra, with a boat from the Espegrend marine biological station, and processed over the days in the gallery space. Arrival depends on weather conditions.
About Common Notions:
At the time when science began to seriously define its own sphere in the 18th-century, it was of great importance to show experiments for a small exclusive public to witness what happened. Truth was to be demonstrated. In a similar manner the audience is invited to witness processes gathered around a small table. At the same time speech reflects on doings carried out to approach an understanding of the world. The space becomes an echo chamber, where doings and sayings in video footage from the wet lab on a research vessel are repeated and responded to.
About the lecture (slightly shortened version in English):
Eli Rinde is a marine biologist with 30 years of experience from studies on ecologies and threats towards the ocean’s blue forests, such as kelp forest, seagrass meadows and mearl beds. These are essential marine habitats that support coastal biological diversity and important services such as cleaning water, carbon sequestration and climatic regulations. She has been mapping and modelling the distribution of these types of seafloor landscapes from north to south and from the outer to inner coast, how their distribution varies over year, and consequences of kelp forest harvesting. The main challenges for the future include how to maintain biodiversity and productivity up against a growing human interest in making use of the coastal areas. Therefore Eli Rinde has in recent years contributed to shaping, constructing and testing nature based solutions in urban environments.
About the reading:
The Cosmic Garden is a poetic essay turning our potential preconception of power relations between plants and humans upside down. Emanuele Coccia is philosopher and affiliated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Among others he has published a book titled The Life of Plants (2016 in English), and his current research concerns the normative power of the image.
The work is supported by:
Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design (KMD), UiB
DIKU - Norwegian Artistic Research Programme
BEK - Bergen Centre for Electronic Art
Visningsrommet USF