How and why are communities formed? What are the rules for their structures, power dynamics and the knowledges and meanings that are shared within them? What are the conditions needed to begin, or become part of a community, and how are these conditions maintained or challenged? What is the specific role of communities in places outside larger cities, or of communities formed through language, dialect, or certain sub-cultures? And how do we take some of these questions further, to think about community as something that includes the other-than-human world? What does it mean to be in community with the land, with the weather?
Pikene på Broen is proud to present a series of lectures, audio-visual contributions, discussions and performances, all of which introduce different ways of thinking through community in relation to the topic of the sweetness of living.
Part 2 includes:
Poor Leadership—Towards the 2026 candidacy. In 2026 Tea Andreoletti will run for mayor as an artist in her hometown, Gromo, a small village of 1200 inhabitants in the mountains of Northern Italy.
It is a long-term project that involves an ambient method of artistic practice: Learning something through doing something else. Tea has chosen to explore leadership through the lens of poverty.
In the culture where the artist grew up, a particular form of poverty has maintained links with its positive condition. It has survived the colonization of economic language, the disappearance of certain social assets and Catholic hegemonic interpretations. In Gromo—as in other places in different forms—positive poverty has survived in gestures, between the verses of songs and disguised under ancient traditions.
Performing leadership through positive poverty opens opportunities to explore to non-stereotyped directions. It is done with what is available and welcomes mildness, shortage, vulnerability, amateurism and a multicultural and multidisciplinary union of poor leaders. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
In Traces in the Atmosphere Prof. Tim Ingold and Matti Aikio present an audiovisual collaborative keynote lecture that deals with the perception of the world around us, as well as how cultures can be thought of in terms of traces and atmospheres. Drawing upon recent works Imagining for Real (Ingold, 2021) and The Archives of Matti Aikio (Aikio, 2021), the artist and anthologist collaborate in a new work that formally explores the topic through voice, space and visuals, followed by a Q&A.
Cod Connection — a discussion about Norwegian cod communities, listening, noise pollution, and the current collaborative work and research being done collectively by the group [Anastasia Savinova, Rebekah Oomen, John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal, and Svein Harald Holmen].
They ask: Can we have a community without listening? For centuries, humans in the Barents region and all over Norway have been living with cod, but in recent years, Norwegian cod populations have been dwindling dangerously. As a result of noise pollution, cod can no longer hear each other. Scientist Rebekah Oomen and sound-artist John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal have been studying codfish mating music, and trying to understand how and why they make sounds. With artist Anastasia Savinova, they create sound-sculpture installations, using cod music, old fishing boats and floats. Fishing artifacts are intertwined with the images of fish bodies, and the installations reflect on the relationship between fish and human.
As part of the Sweetness of Living symposium, they will give insight into their current work. Together with Vardø fisherman Svein Harald Holmen they will also discuss how better listening between scientists and fishermen can help us live in harmony with our aquatic friends.
The Ocean’s Poem — a performance screening of the 2018 collaboration by dancer Alexander Kozin and choreographers Maria Pyatkova and Matthias Härtig representing the tragedy of those who were unjustly convicted and covertly executed en masse in Sandarmoch— a tract of land in Karelia.
One of the missions of this project was the preservation of historical memory and the rethinking of it through the lens of art. The project tells a story of three outstanding humanitarian researchers who were executed and buried in Sandarmoch in 1937: Les Kurbas (an avant garde theater director who revolutionized the theatre of his time), Kuzebai Gerd (an Udmurtian folk poet, writer and ethnographer, who played a unique role in the development of Udmurtian literature and culture), Nikolay Dornovo (an outstanding linguist whose research in Slavistics and dialectology constitute the foundations of linguistic theory).
The conceptual framework of the production is a section of a poem by Walt Whitman, In Cabin’d Ships At Sea, which tells of the profound fates of seafarers. Drawing inspiration from Whitman’s poetry, the artists live through the various dimensions of the inner worlds of the pioneer scientist of the time: from passion, fanaticism, faith, and sacrifice to uncertainty and despair. The digital environment consequently supports, resists and then absorbs the people serving as a symbol of the helplessness of those who confront a political system.
About the presenters:
Tea Andreoletti is an artist who works as a storyteller, water-sommelier, pilgrimages guide, non-professional fencer and candidate for mayor in the 2026 Gromo elections. Her nomadic projects are documented in oral stories and embroidery on her Sunday Dress.
Tim Ingold, FBA, FRSE, is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Sámi and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organization in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020) and Imagining For Real (2022).
Matti Aikio is an artist working mainly with photography and video as well as with sculptural installations, sound art and music. His ongoing work explores the phenomenon where Sámi people find themselves caught in the middle of opposing nation state run nature politics—where the Sámi people’s land is roughly speaking seen either as a resource for extraction, or strict nature reserve that has to be protected also from the Sámi people and their livelihoods.
John Andrew Wilhite-Hannisdal is a composer and double bassist living in Oslo, Norway. John Andrew works with musicians and artists in both Europe and the Americas, performing and creating a variety of projects that both develop new techniques and reframe older and neglected material. In the US, J.A. collaborates with musicians and composers such as Derek Baron and Elliott Sharp, while in Europe he works with Katt Hernandez, Henriette Eilertsen, Andreas Røysum, and others. He is also active creating music and sound for theater and dance performances.
Rebekah Oomen is an evolutionary ecologist interested in how organisms respond to environmental change, including how adaptation to local environments in the past influences contemporary plastic responses and future environmental adaptation. She combines experiments with sequencing and bioinformatics to investigate these questions and is particularly interested in the genomic basis and spatial scale of local adaptation in the face of gene flow. She is currently a James S. McDonnell Foundation Fellow at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo and a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Coastal Research and Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research at the University of Agder.
A multi-disciplinary artist, born near the Ural Mountains in the USSR in 1988, Anastasia Savinova has since 2013 been working and living in Sweden. Her practice spans photography, collage, drawing, text, video, sound and performance. With her architectural background, she holds affection to constructing and building. A keen mountain walker, she is deeply moved and inspired by the wilderness. She works both with man-made and natural environments, and embraces phenomenological approaches in exploring them.
Alexander Kozin is a dancer and choreographer from the city of Petrozavodsk in North-West Russia. His original focus was the folk dances of the Karelia region of Russia, including Karelian, Finnish, Ingermanlan, Veps traditions and Later German folk dance tradition. Kozin has danced with folk ensembles since childhood, receiving strict dance education in both classical- and folk-performance technique. At present, he focuses on contemporary dance techniques such as improvisation, contact improvisation, movement research and physical theatre. He also explores how to combine both traditional and contemporary dance techniques.
Credit: This event was originally broadcast live on February 26, 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.
