Part 1 includes: 

Exploring Queer Potentialities of Darkness a multivocal lecture by Irina Shirobokova on modern marginality in the North. Stemming from an involved research process using collective writing as a community engagement method, the lecture shares some of the research insights found throughout the process.

The dualism of light/darkness arose as a symbolic formula for morality once primordial darkness had been split into light and dark (Anzaldua, 1987). Now Darkness is identified with negative and evil forces. Darkness is a particular material condition of the nocturnal space in the Arctic; material and metaphorical space of women’s invisibility, and simultaneously, a source of emancipation and alternative knowledge production.

This lecture is an effort to debunk the Enlightenment myth associated with darkness as the “other” of light—as an absence, a lack, or inverse. Through the concept of darkness, Shirobokova suggests respatializing traditional geographical hierarchies where dispossessed female/subaltern bodies, sexualities, stories, and lands were considered as “dark”/ “ungeographical other.”

An artist talk with Barents Spektakel exhibition artists Espen Sommer Eide and Riikka Keränen as they discuss their working processes, engagement with materials and the social and community aspects of their current artistic practice.

Song of Cow Dung —a performative presentation by Chill Survive (Tinna Grétarsdóttir and Pia Lindman) that chews up the good life, bit by bit—like cows. The research ruminates in Nordic vernacular architecture. There, cows and humans lived together on the same turf. These lived companionships have almost come to their ends and are being swallowed, digested and absorbed, to be later re-membered as undivided parts of the good life. Fermentation transforms sources of continuity—of those who have become and those yet to become world makers and nourishers. 

Planetary transformations dissolve human identities to weave new dependencies and collaborations between a multitude of existences. Myths and history intermingle. Kuusamo historian Ervasti tells us that “lantalaiset” is a name the now almost forgotten forest Sámi gave the Finnish colonizers, who brought cows. Cows provided dung for agriculture. “Lantalaiset” means “the people of the cow dung.” Cow dung nurtures the microbe Myxcoccus vacchae  and that is connected to human happiness. Naming is defining: this bacteria lives in any kind of rotting soil independent of cows. Happiness de-colonized.

Their presentation is an exercise in collective re-membering with cow dung, amniotic sacks, songs, listening and hearing.

The programme continues on Saturday with contributions from Tea Andreoletti, Prof Tim Ingold and Matti Aikio, John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdale, Rebekah Oomen, Anastasia Savinova, Svein Harald Holmen and Alexander Kozin.

About the presenters
Irina Shirobokova is a research fellow at the Centre for Independent Social Research and doctoral student at The City University of New York. She specializes in political anthropology, urban geography and transdisciplinary research with the focus on feminist, experimental and collaborative methods and embodied knowledge production. She has been working in the Murmansk region in various research, urban-planning and art-science projects within the last 6 years.

Espen Sommer Eide is a composer and artist based in Bergen, Norway. His artistic practice involves time-based media with a special focus on music and sound. This is further characterized by an experimental approach to instruments, archives, places and languages. In addition to installation and performances, he is a representative of experimental electronic music from Norway, growing out of the techno scene of Tromsø in the 90s, with main projects Alog and Phonophani, and a string of releases on the labels Rune Grammofon, Hubro, Sofa and others. His works have been exhibited and performed at Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen Assembly, Manifesta, Marres, Henie Onstad kunstsenter, Stedelijk Museum, De Halle Haarlem, Dark Ecology, Sonic Acts, Mutek festival, GRM/Presences Électronique, Performa Festival, Museo Reina Sofia and more. Sommer Eide is also a member of the theatre/art collective Verdensteatret, with extensive international touring and exhibi­tions

Riikka Keränen is a visual artist and farmer from Ristijärvi in the Kainuu region of Finland. She graduated with a degree in sculpture from the Kankaanpää School of Fine Art in 2010. Keränen’s work involves playing and thinking in dialogue with the entire spectrum of the world’s materials. Through her work, the artist reflects upon the entangled nature between human and other-than-human worlds.

Chill Survive Network, founded by Tinna Grétarsdóttir and Pia Lindman, is a platform for mutual exchange and collaboration between researchers, curators, artists and institutions in the North-beyond-the-global-North. They engage in human and non-human entanglements and the development of new strategies, tactics, methodology and language that speak to our present ecological crisis. The objective is to explore, learn, mediate, and cope with the future transformations in the Arctic.

Tinna Grétarsdóttir is trained as a visual anthropologist (PhD) and seeks new ways to combine research and art. She has curated exhibitions on art and neoliberal cultural politics, competing discourses of creativity and human and non-human ecologies. Grétarsdóttir is currently co-writing a book on architecture as multispecies organism.

Pia Lindman is an artist and researcher who works with performance art, healing-as-art, installation, microbes, architecture, painting and sculpture. A result of many years of investigation into the body and its place within the cultural space, Lindman’s work now moves beyond the human body proper to multiple realms of organic and inorganic life.

Credit: This event was originally broadcast live on February 25, 2022 as part of Barents Spektakel. COURTESY PIKENE PÅ BROEN. 

This story is part of the Pikene på Broen Spotlight. View more content from the Spotlight here.