We have received again excellent applications for our Ars Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station this spring. We want to thank everyone who applied for this opportunity. The final selections have now been made, and the artists will be travelling to the North later this year and in 2025. Below short introductions to all the selected projects.
Frouke Wiarda and Judith van der Elst will be exploring their shared interest in atmospheric patterns and winds as elemental mediums and carriers of suspended life forms through their experience as an anthropologist and sound artist respectively.
Claudio Filho will explore human-data-landscape relationships through poetic data visualisation. He perceives landscapes as contested territories; particularly with their images and data, to critique coloniality, prompting reflections on the state of global environments.
Laura Lowe is interested in ‘bioindicators’ and the visuality of change, subjects that blur the timescales of change from deep time to the temporal. During her residency, she will explore macro/micro ‘landscapes’ in local geology and biology.
Riikka Thitz will be continuing her research based on the concept of landscape dramaturgy in the environment of Kilpisjärvi: its structures, temporalities and textures during the spring months, she will shift the focus from obvious temporal structures to cycles such as the hooting of the owls.
Kati Kärki will observe the different elements essential but missing from the mountains in Scotland yet present in Kilpisjärvi. How does this possible arctic-alpine habitat they are trying to restore look, feel, sound and smell? How can embodied knowledge be used in science?
Leena Saarinen will experientially studies how the camera's optics work, aiming to alter slightly the human-centred gaze of the eye of the camera. Within the project, she wants to create alternative softer and more empathetic ways of looking at the non-human world.
Hele Okkonen will study the growth pattern, essence, and habitat of lichens that grow as regionally threatened species in the Kilpisjärvi area, as part of their rya making process.
Olive Bieringa will be reflecting, writing of and developing a performance for her doctorate. With the performance, she offers practices for living and dying together on a damaged earth and invites us to not only look forward but to look around and notice what we are losing.
Kelley O'Brien is interested in narrative storytelling and she will explore the deep past and potential future of one of the oldest rock formations, Saana Fell.
Atso Airola will explore how sounds create and evoke collective memories by recording (underwater) sounds, and by conducting experimental interviews. Airola will be recollecting and organising previous recordings, and exploring what a sound memory archive of the collective Arctic soundscapes could look, feel and sound like.
Line Krom aims to study the composition and sources of Arctic aerosols and dust, focusing on their colonial origins and the socio-economic and cultural effects of aerosol pollution on Sami communities. Specifically, how aerosols influence ice crystal formation and cloud dynamics.
Carolyn Kirschner is interested in the relationship between remote sensing instruments and the landscapes they are embedded within. How do these instruments sense the landscape? Where are the gaps and glitches? What role do machine senses and environmental data play in shaping cultural understandings of ecologies?
Paula Kramer, Gesa Piper and Venla Helenius want to welcome conversations with the human and non-human expertise of Kilpisjärvi, delving into developing an image-based language that neither privileges nor erases the human being/figure/dancer.
Eamon Edmundson-Wells and Ziggy Lever will explore how the act of measuring exists alongside an ethos of environmental guardianship. How might the act of making a measurement open up ways of being present to the world?
With interest in the warming climate and ecological awareness, artists Malavika Byju and Kush Kukreja will translate the impact of the UV rays into visual markers, like colour spectra, coded patterns, alphabets, icons, or shapes.
Sybille Neumeyer is interested in musicalising various "data sets" of observation: from her embodied sensing of local weather, the attention to the movement of insects, birds, animals, clouds, the stories of local inhabitants and indigenous communities, and data stories from scientists about the climatic and phenological shifts in the local ecology.
Bioart Society organizes an open call for Ars Bioarctica residency once a year. Ars Bioarctica is a self-funded opportunity, but from time to time Bioart Society also organizes funded residencies under the Ars Bioarctica umbrella. You can read about the previous resident artists' experiences on the residency blog on our website.
Photo: Dale Rio in Ars Bioarctica residency in 2023.