The choir of the sheep

Hjemmefra Residency

The residence hjemmefra by the union Oslo, filled with mushrooms, water, new friends and warmest super power hospitality. Thank you Martinka, Oscar and Alejandra for the very productive non – productivity!

Fattmi

Dear Måna

In their work for the Solarpunk arts festival of 2023 in Rjukan, the group Kultivator has focused their
interest on the river Måna and her history and possible future together with the multi-species
communities she runs through. From her past of connecting mountain lakes to the sea with a
delicate eco system of migrating life forms, moving sediments, and contributing through millennia to
the planets hydrologic cycle, going into supplying energy to what would become an industrial world
heritage, and soon about to feed Salmon farms and server halls with her harnessed powers, she is
the centrepiece of many entangled stories. What would her own say for the future be? Could we as
artists, scientists or just members of human society, begin to hear that by speculating or imagining?
In the project Dear Måna… , Kultivator initiates a correspondence with the river, a long overdue
letter, that experiments with modes of listening and giving voice, mixing familiar language with
attempts of speaking in river, having her ceaseless current as a companion in the work.
One part of the correspondence takes physical form in wet clay letters in the river bed, that
Kultivator entered on Thursday the 29:th of June. The performance of shaping the letters, lowering
them to the riverbed, and writing them in between Månas polished rocks and gravel took seven
hours. After receiving the letter, she is now doing her reading, the words are dissolving, following her
movement down through Rjukan, passing dams and turbines, perhaps landing as a thin layer on the
calm river floor in her mouth at Tinnsjøen. Only she knows for how long the text will still be readable
from Fabrikksbrua. Hopefully and probably, we will still see traces from them during the Solarpunk
arts festival summer 2023.
The sentence, “Dear Måna, How are we doing (it together in the future?)” is just the start of a letter,
and is to be continued by the visitors of the Solarpunk arts festival during the summer 2023, as
another part of the correspondence. In Rjukan Varelagret, with a view over Måna, a small Office of
experimental river communication is set up. Here anyone who wish can continue the letter to Måna,
using porcelain clay dissolved in her water as ink, writing or drawing on the walls or on rocks from
her riverbed. Messages written on the rocks will be delivered back to Måna after the exhibitions end
in September. The installation will, just as the clay letters at the river floor, be read and transformed
by many to a not yet known form. Maybe, possibly, opening for a small shift in the way we look at
time, control, and our ability to think with entities such as Måna in imagining the future.

Woods co-lab, finding new relations

Mathieu Vrijman is the founder of Kultivator, and since 2005 has worked with experimental encounters between humans and ecosystems, both as an artistic practice and as an organizer and curator in a series of national and international projects. In the Woods co – lab, Mathieu Vrijman has created a place for listening to the forest through investigations of the materials it provides and has given us humans throughout the ages. Bendable hazel, split ash trunks, linden’s inner bark, limestone and charcoal create a place and a space for meetings between the forest ecosystem and human creativity. The work consists of a long house, woven into the growing hazels of the Forest Pasture, a fireplace, as well as tools and examples that invite more people to continue working together both with the Forest’s materials, and with new visions for the landscape of the future.
With support from KULTURRÅDET
More info here

En del av Landskapet

A part of the Landscape
Is a series of artistic interventions in Öland Mittlands unique, multifunctional culture and natural
environment, where five different artists are invited to make and present site-specific works in the
forest pasture, each with their own perspective, and with an invited guest who has special
knowledge of the site. Here a format for conversation is created in and with a place, where a more
than a thousand-year collaboration between humans, domestic animals, plants and microorganisms
takes place. What is our common future? And how do we relate to the conflicts between species and
lifestyles that are becoming increasingly critical in a time of mass extinction and climate change?

More info here

Vi är vilda bin

Kultivator
Bamboo, recycled tin, recycled brick, ash trunk and linseed oil fired iron, 2022
on behalf of the city of Helsingborg

Public commission, Villa Canzonetta preschool in Helsingborg. We have chosen to highlight the wild bee, a key figure in the ecosystems around us, and a species that is grateful to start from when you want to talk, play and create sustainability together with children. The shape of the wings is taken from the beautiful and endangered small Golden sand bee, and the material is sink plate, recycled from demolitions in the area. The bodies are bamboo bundles, which bees and other wild insects can use as nests. Under the trees is a large bee, the body is the trunk of an ash that stood in the area before, and the wings are made of recycled bricks, also from demolitions in the area

K:Ö:K visiting Kultivator

k.ö.k (Kvinnor önskar kollektivitet – Women Desire Collectivity) is a feminist platform that experiments with ways to build a feminist institution from the existing experiences, location and context of the community of The Women’s Centre in Tensta Hjulsta.

Göhsir

A public art piece at Nynäs Slott curated by Artlab Gnesta.

Vid den gamla almen intill Nynäs köksträdgård har konstnärerna i Kultivator tillsammans med elever från Öknaskolans naturbruksgymnasium byggt, flätat och vävt fram ett slott för biologisk mångfald. Nu inviger vi äntligen det nya slottet under festliga former!

Ur gammal sly och ved reser sig nu ett nytt slott i skuggan av det gamla. Här kan bland annat harar, fåglar och småkryp söka sin tillflykt. Den biologiska mångfalden är oerhört viktig för naturens grundläggande funktioner, som pollinering och rening av luft och vatten. 

Dyestad bygata spirar

Alla vi djur och människor på Dyestad bygata hälsar er välkomna till öppna ateljéer, hästtaxi, god mat, servering, hantverk, loppis, brukskeramik, filmpub och växtförsäljning mm här hos oss.

Jorddyrkare

Principle 7: Design from patterns to details

Workshop at Österängens konsthall
Listen to the podd by Johanna Linder

Landskapet

The Landscape is a link between Moderna Museet and Kultivator, where the latter undertakes to increase biodiversity on a piece of leased land on Öland. There are two copies of the contract. One copy, “attested” by a piece of soil from the leased land, is shown in a glass display in the Museum. The other copy is stored in an identical display at the Kultivator farm, where it is regularly filled with traces or objects from the ongoing activities in the landscape. This display unit will be donated to Moderna Museet after five years. The work, Landscape, can be seen as a performance where the artists’ actions in harmony with the various ecosystems represent the landscape on Öland. Kultivator is an experimental organic farming and art cooperative located in Dyestad on Öland. The group’s practice merges artistic research with developments in alternative farming methods.

On the shores of now

A walking-in-time performance with donkeys from Kultivator’s farm and donkeys from the Rural Alchemy Workshop (RAW) in Oregon, US, over shared planetary horizons, as the sun sets and rises at the same time. The donkeys from each art collective walk in the company of small groups of children, along with the artists Karin Bolender (US) and Malin Lindmark Vrijman (SE).

The two parties move simultaneously on different continents–one into the sunset, one into the sunrise–to meet and mirror each other at distant but always connected shores. When they reach the shores, they lower a saddle into the waterbody and watch it slowly submerge.

Reflecting back on the long walking journey of Karin Bolender and the donkey Aliass nearly twenty years ago, and on the countless pilgrimages made in companionship with donkeys in humankind’s history, this walk looks both forward and backward and frames an intergenerational movement that aligns time, climate, and global waters in a shared moment of attention. The sinking of the saddles could just as well be the rising of waters globally. The witnesses, children and donkeys, could be all of us.
In the Explorations of Now manifestation, the sunrise walk in Huddinge departed from the site of a video installation that documents another Mirror Shots performance-exchange across these same time zones a year earlier: this piece, made by Karin Bolender and Agnese Cebere in the RAW donkey pasture during Kultivator’s workshop in Sweden in fall 2020, took place at the edge of massive wildfires that began that day and raged across the Western US, bringing smoke-hazed skies to Sweden weeks later. Both the video installation and the sunrise/sunset walk invite those in Huddinge, humans and equines and others, to join us in this collective moment of planetary reflection.

Explorations of Now | Walk in art, with nature | 12-15 & 19-22 augusti

Experience dance performances, art installations, and performance art with rock faces, fields, moss, trees, and water as co-creators. Explorations of Now is a unique collaboration where art, dance, science, and nature meet to let visitors begin the journey to a sustainable world together.

Soil symposium

The Soil Symposium is a cross disciplinary meeting place for artists and researchers to discuss the matter, memories and futures of soil.
The focus of the seminar will be the work of Swedish art and agriculture group Kultivator, who will share their commission for The Experimental Field called the Soil Faculty.
The symposium is a gathering site for the researchers from many different fields who have contributed to the Experimental Field to connect in an interdisciplinary environment. Departing from the artwork presented by Kultivator, the symposium is a practical way to share inter-disciplinary perspectives on the vast topic of soil as experimental matter.
Curator and moderator of the Soil Symposium is Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Project Leader Researcher Collaborations at Accelerator.

Soil Faculty

Installation view from the exhibition “The Experimental Field” at Accelerator 2021. 

On the shores of now, preview

M/Other Futures

Workshop M/other futures at Kultivator, part of the project m/other becomings,  a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE), Art Lab Gnesta (SE) and Bioart Society (FI). http://www.labae.org/past#/mother-becomings

In this workshop, the invited artists Signe Johannessen, SE/NO, Karin Bolender, US, Riina Hannula, FI, the Rhizomatic squad for radical care, FR, and their families, has worked (and lived) around questions about how kinship and family constellations can be cultivated beyond gender and anthropocentric policies, and extended into the more-than-human. With the kind and patient participation of numerous more-than-human bodies, we have been able to try the possibilities of challenging and broadening the concept of family/household and take a closer look at the interplay between ecology and home (the word ecology comes from the Greek “Oikos”, which means home) The outcome of the workshop was shared with the audience in an open day, and will be further developed for an exhibition in Artlab Gnesta in November.

Funded by IASPIS, Nordic culture point, Nordic culture fund

The leaking monument

The leaking monument is a part of Statens konstråds kunskapssatsning “Lokala konstprojekt“
Kultivator, Öland. Artists: Signe Johannessen, Erik Rören, Mathieu Vrijman and Trish Roan.
See the website: https://theleakingmonument.se/

Explorations of now, workshops at Kultivator