Future Stories: On Oslo Apiary & Aviary 2014–2018

At the core of Oslo Apiary & Aviary’s artistic practice during the years 2014 to 2018 is ecological intervention performed in urban areas. Taking their work from this period as a point of departure, this chapter explores how ‘ecoventions’—such as facilitating for birds, moths and insects in the city—can challenge common perceptions regarding urban spaces and allow for reflection and re-thinking about ontological co-existence in the city. It is argued that Oslo Apiary & Aviary are storytellers that enact new futures that point towards a more sustainable life in the city, both for humans and for birds, moths and insects.

Uncanny Drought: On Apichaya Wanthiang’s Evil Spirits Only Travel in Straight Lines

Apichaya Wanthiang’s art installation Evil Spirits Only Travel in Straight Lines (2018) recreated a drought in Thailand by filling the gallery space in Oslo with soothing heat emanating from huge, dry, dirt sculptures. Visitors to the exhibition were encouraged to both touch and sit down on the dried clay sculptures. They were bone dry and felt warm on the skin. The recreated environmental event was contrasted with the freezing Oslo winter outside the gallery space, but the inside and the outside of the gallery were also connected through a synchronisation of the dim light in the exhibition space and the ongoing dusk outside—opening up for the sensorial aspect of climatic change. By describing a subjective experience of Wanthiang’s environmental event, this chapter shows how an uncanny drought in an exhibition space can activate a mode of habituation when faced with the overwhelming consequences of the age of humans.

Exhibiting Nordic Values: A Critical Look at the IKEA Store

IKEA proposes a distinct showroom experience for its stores globally—a successful model that is frequently imitated by competitors and widely analysed by academics. In this chapter, the IKEA showroom is considered as a cultural institution rather than a store: a museum of modern living. The ‘IKEA Museum’ is evaluated for its cultural impact, focusing mostly on the narrative that it offers to the visitor regarding his/her own role and agency in the Anthropocene. Drawing on authors such as Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Carol Duncan and Naomi Klein, it is argued that the choices in showroom design and brand messages portray many known tropes of neoliberal culture, reducing the citizen to an individual consumer rather than empowering his/her political awareness. The chapter ends with a suggestive subversion of the current situation, as the IKEA showroom is briefly re-imagined as a more ethical and culturally responsible version of itself.

Touching the Unknown: On Marte Johnslien’s Ceramic Presences

Touching is never a unidirectional event; what you touch will always touch you back. ‘How can the way we relate to the world around us take shape as sculpture?’ Norwegian artist Marte Johnslien asks. In the 2018 exhibition A Square on a Sphere at Lillehammer Kunstmuseum (Art Museum), Johnslien showed, amongst other works, a sculpture consisting of ceramic shapes stacked on top of each other with glass plates between. In this work, Johnslien explored a new technique of reinforcing ceramics in which she put steel mesh underneath the clay. By strengthening the thin ceramic shapes with iron, Johnslien changed the material and thus changed the texture. This chapter elaborates on how artistic presence can provide a way to access the glitch between the visible and the invisible, by exploring the ceramic works by Johnslien in light of Barad’s essay on touching, esotericist Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky’s view on the fourth dimension, Eastern philosophy, and relativity theory.

Solar Reflections: On the Sun Mirror in Rjukan

The Sun Mirror (2013) by Martin Andersen is a mirror machine placed upon a mountain top. It reflects sunlight down to the town square in Rjukan, a small Norwegian town that is located in the shade for almost six months each year. Based on a century-old idea, the mirror realised the dream of Rjukan’s inhabitants to see the sun in wintertime. What makes the idea of a man-made sun mirror still relevant in the 21st Century, 100 years after its first mention in the heyday of the Second Industrial Revolution? This chapter contextualises the Sun Mirror by discussing ecological aesthetics and argues that despite its technological structure, the mirror opposes treating nature as a recourse for human exploitation. Rather it makes visible the properties of the sun (the sun’s temporality and rhythm) and promotes the sun in itself as life-giving and vital for us humans.

Form follows Environment: On Snøhetta’s Powerhouse Brattørkaia

The ecological and social paradoxes of Snøhetta’s Powerhouse Brattørkaia in Trondheim beg the question of what environment the developers are considering. By discussing ‘the World’s Northernmost Energy-Positive Building,’ this chapter considers the intentions of green technology in architecture, such as: what are climate-favourable solutions; what may happen when our increasing need for sustainable power is realised through architecture; and how does this need dictate architectural form? The chapter discusses how technology is a presumed answer to the climate crisis, whether the power supply market is changing, and how nature and degrowth is interpreted.

Bioacoustical Ethics: On Joakim Blattmann’s Treverk (9)

Based on the artwork Treverk (9) by Norwegian artist Joakim Blattmann, this chapter discusses whether it is possible to exhibit a tree in a gallery space and still respect the tree as having inherent value, in accordance with Arne Næss and George Sessions’ ‘Principles of Deep Ecology’. Aspects such as the artist’s intention, the origin of the materials and the installation of the final artwork are put into question and analysed from a deep ecological perspective. If the tree’s desire is to live, then chopping it up and presenting it as a human spectacle in a gallery space is not to respect its inherent value. Yet the chapter argues that Treverk (9) can still inspire ecological thinking by disturbing the anthropocentric world view and displaying a deep relationality between the artist and the tree.

Becoming Bear: On the Sami Yoik, Music, and Human Involution

Can a human become a bear? Starting from an analysis of Sami yoik, this chapter suggests how the notion of becoming-animal could shed a light on this musical practice and bring out some relevant ethico-aesthetical implications. The concept of becoming-animal, as theorised by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, emphasises the proximity of the human and the non-human realm and, along with the yoik, shows the illusory nature of their division. The chapter discusses this theoretical-practical nexus and examines the potentialities of music and sound worlds in fostering a different arrangement of the way we perceive the world—freed from anthropocentrism’s chains and contiguous with a non-human sensitivity.

Creative Fungus: On Fredrik Værslev’s Mildew Paintings

Fredrik Værslev’s Mildew Paintings cannot be defined as paintings in the conventional sense. They are the result of mildew growth developing over the course of a year on canvases stored inside humid plastic tubes. As such, their exact nature eludes us, not being straight-forward painterly objects, nor simple pieces of fungus-eaten material. This chapter aims to define the Mildew Paintings’ hybrid identity through the theories of interspecies entanglements of anthropologist Anna Tsing and Gilles Clément’s approach to what he refers to as the third landscape in urban gardening. The paintings are regarded as the result of a new-found collaboration between human and non-human processes, pushing the artist into the background while introducing other creative entities, leaving us to question our hegemonic role as this world’s sole active designers.

Sensing Algae: On Marjolijn Dijkman and Toril Johannessen’s Reclaiming Vision

This chapter explores questions of ontology and non-human life in the site-specific screening of Marjolijn Dijkman and Toril Johannessen’s film Reclaiming Vision, shown at the point where the river flows into the fjord in a recently developed area of downtown Oslo. By filming water samples through a microscope, the artists have magnified the rich, microbiotic life of the Aker River and the inner Oslo Fjord, making actants such as algae, bacteria and fungi visible to humans. The chapter claims that by presenting life from the position of the microorganisms in the water, Reclaiming Vision presents a radical and flat form of ontology that brings up important ethical and political perspectives that are vital for developing ways of living together with the non-humans that surround us.