WAP 23 had more than 90 applicants we are happy to provide the list of attending artists!
We extended the duration to September-November, still the main focus is on the original dates.
WALKING AS PRACTICE 2023
SEPTEMBER
1 month: NAHELLI CHAVOYA, HAYLEY WHELAN, ANTONIA AITKEN
1 week: JANICE JENSEN, CECILIA LAGERSTRÖM
2 weeks: , KARIN BRYGGER, ANNELAURE VERNET, REBEKAH DEAN
OCTOBER - Artist presentations pending, will be added as artists provide
1 month: GERHARD KOWALD, JORDAN ROWE, AURIKE QUINTELLIER
1 week: BENEDICTE DAHM, DIANNE REID, ALEX HAWTHORN , BERNARDITA BENNETT, FERNADA BRANCO, CECILIA HEDLUND, HEATHER/HEY THERE KAPPLOW
2 weeks: ANNA MIKUSKOVA , CLIFF ANDRADE, JAMES CUNNINGHAM
WAP SEPTEMBER
SHORT BIO
Nahelli Chavoya is a PhD candidate at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She is a dancer, poet, and dance researcher from Mexico. All of Nahelli’s artistic practices, as well as her academic career, have always been entwined. Her research addresses the relationship between poetry, nature, and the experience of the dancer, focusing on her own experience as an Irish step dance practitioner and poetry writer. She is interested in investigating the relationship between her practices, and in exploring poetry as an experiential approach through dance.
PROPOSED WORK
In this residency, Nahelli will be working on an artistic work informed by her most recent art installation presented as part of her PhD. In this project, she researches poetry as an approach to reality and claims that dance can be assumed as poetry in that sense. In this research, she has noticed how her long walks in the forest and her dance-as-poetry practice are closely related. She will be exploring this relationship further.
Studio 11
REBEKAH DEAN
SHORT BIO
I am a London based woman artist curator, born 1958, working in visual and live art; I work with my neurodivergent and ageing body.
My creative practice revolves around the activity of walking, which may or may not produce an artwork, however, the walking is critical to making artworks, and as I age, I notice an absence in my extremities, and walk, I must. I feel that in my walking I tune into my potential as a creative material, I remember more deeply, I visualise and know my internal landscape more clearly.
During 2023, I appeared in a solo exhibition ‘Discharging Materials’ at ‘The Surgery Gallery’, London, and the group show ‘Mother’s Ruin’ with the floor installation ‘Contagion’ at 35Blumen gallery in Krefeld Germany. In March, I led public Walking & Drawing wellbeing workshops, as part of Women’s History month, at The Feminist Library. I am currently an exhibiting artist in the ‘Artist Support Pledge 3’ exhibition, Huddersfield Art Gallery.
I have been funded by Arts Council England 2020, as Artist Curator of Sculpture Trail ‘Briefly IN-TRANSIT’; 2006 Artist Collaboration Kitchen Antics & Appliances, Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture.
PROPOSED WORK
I have been working with the material of hay, as a representation of generational time andspace, and would be interested in getting to know the Bjorko Konstnod site and environment to source other types of organic materials with which to explore and develop hand-build processes.I would also enjoy the opportunity to become accountable regarding creative practice through reading and writing, and participate in conversations about awareness in the body, tuning into our surroundings, through ways of moving on our feet.
Studio 15Sept 4-18
HAYLEY WHELAN
SHOT BIO
Hayley Whelan is a Scottish artist and curator based in Dundee. In 2015, she graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design with an honours degree in Fine Art and in 2016 she obtained her masters degree in Art, Society and Publics.
Over the years she has developed a repetitive, ritual-like practice involving walking and film photography. These walks are the basis for research and interests in architecture, cities, public spaces, non-places, the spaces in-between and the interactions that take place within them all. Working across various mediums such as printmaking, photography, collage, writing and sculpture, her work explores themes of gender and place. Working collaboratively with other artists and venues, she has curated several group walks and guided tours in Scotland.
Most recently, she was awarded the Creative Scotland Visual Artist and Craft Maker Award to develop and curate a collection of walks titled 'The Walking Women' which focuses her practice-led research on exploring women's relationship with place and how we feel walking in public spaces.
PROPOSED WORK
At BKN, I look forward to engaging, learning and connecting with other creatives that use walking as practice and through this gain fresh perspective on the development of my new work, 'The Walking Women'. The knowledge gained during the residency can be carried forward within this work, ensuring it becomes as special as it can be. I'm particularly keen to focus on the writing for this work, and I'm looking forward to making use of the darkroom and other facilities. BKN's beautiful surroundings offer a new place to respond to, make new work and collectively investigate. Through walking, reflecting and sharing we can aim to deepen our understanding of what walking as practice is and can be. I intend to immerse myself fully in the experience, engaging open-mindedly to be receptive to collaboration and professional development.
Studio 1
Sept 4-Oct 2
ANTONIA AITKEN
SHORT BIO
Antonia Aitken is an artist and educator currently living in lutruwita/ Tasmania, Australia. Her creative research practice is informed by critical place theory, walking, and a material knowledge of printmaking and drawing. Her work considers walking and drawing based methodologies as forms of critical inquiry and dialogue with place. As a settler-descendent living in Australia, the challenge of how to address the complexities of walking unceded territories is a fundamental question. Her work considers how walking can enable re-conceptualisations of place that nurture ethical relations. Antonia is a skilled educator and is currently lecturing in Printmaking, Drawing and Critical Practices at the University of Tasmania. Her work is held in significant public collections, and she has exhibited and undertaken residencies nationally and internationally.
PROPOSED WORK
WALKING AS PRACTICE presents a unique opportunity to connect with an unknown place, as well as creative practitioners who recognise and are exploring the political, philosophical and poetic dimensions of walking as an act of inquiry and dialogue with place. Like lutruwita/ Tasmania, Björkö is an island with a unique ecological and cultural landscape, shaped by its geographic position within a local and global archipelago. To live on an island is to understand being simultaneously autonomous and in-relation; both connected and separated; particular and universal. I am curious to consider how this island place in the Northern Archipelago of Stockholm might shift or expand my thinking about islands as loci for relation and imagination.
During the residency I intend to enact a familiar process of moving and deep listening with place. I will use an expanded drawing approach where my body and gesture are employed as a way of physically and conceptually negotiating and mapping my experience. The marks I make become a record and trace of my embodied wayfinding. I am looking forward to the opportunity to share the residency process through dialogue with other residents and community, enabling conversation about the process and potential of thinking with one’s body in place.
Studio 28Sept 4-Oct 2
ANNELAURE VERNET
SHORT BIO
As a visual artist and photographer, I have pursued my artistic practice in parallel with a militant feminist commitment and theoretical research in the field of arts revealed through the prism of gender.
I have been a professional author-photographer, before becoming, 10 years ago, a lecturer and researcher in Visual Arts at the Université de Lorraine, and co-founder of a university gallery, Galerie 0.15//Essais Dynamiques.
My artistic practice, my militant commitment to La Barbe, a feminist action group, and my theoretical research in arts are still developing today, always energizing each other.
My plastic art practices all take part in the elaboration of a formal work of assemblage, installation and, recently, video pieces.
In the context of assemblage work, I developed silver photographic prints as part of a long-term project on the natural landscape, which has been acquired by the Bibliothèque Nationale, as well as by collectors.
My pictorial, photographic and videographic research responds to each other in a poïèsis where slowness and attention to the most tenuous open up the infinite landscapes of memory's beating in the present. I'm looking for listening and waiting, the traces of encounters and the paths offered up in fragments, the driftwood of an ancient oceanic feeling.
PROPOSED WORK
“Walk, Glean, Live in”, collectively invent a definition of "habitable territory", plural and divergent.
How to do it: Walk, glean, entangle our practices, reveal their particularities and their communities.
My proposal is to walk to glean, and to glean two things. They could be a pebble, a branch, a dry stem, a thought, an idea, a word, a gesture.
One of the things will be gleaned to relate to one's own practice, and the other thing will be gleaned to give to one of the artists in residence.
Each person will keep for a while (one to 3 days) the thing gleaned and the thing received.
There will be a second walk, with time to tell the others: what the gleaned object confirms, transforms, or sheds light on from one's own artistic practice; what the object we've been offered does to us; what these things tell us about our landscapes (real and inner). Together, we'll explore what makes a territory habitable.
At the end of this second walk, or during a third, there will be a time to return the things collected, and perhaps compose the first landmarks of this habitable territory, listening to the landscape.
SHORT BIO
Janice Jensen is an illustrator, graphic designer and art teacher from Germany. Completing her Ma Arts at the university of applied sciences in Bielefeld in 2022 as well as studying painting at Vilnius Art Academy in Lithuania. Janice has also been project coordinator for the contemporary art festival Supergau in Salzburg Austria and part of the founding and running of the Bielefeld based feminist magazine and collective Naturtrüb which publishes the work of its 30 female artists and researchers and also functions as a network that creates a space to exchange and support their related projects.
Her most recent work involves experimenting with different methods to depict landscape and movement while walking, focusing on the perception of surroundings, depicting shapes, structures and movement in relation to space. In order to perform this practice she has designed a drawing machine, a tool on which one can draw on paper scrolls continuously while walking. This method of drawing is then adapted into drawing and painting mediums as well as animation and 3D VR-Landscapes which transform and combine the drawings into an interactive visual experience. .
PROPOSED WORK
The island of Björkö with its natural enclosed environment and moraines is an ideal area to further experiment with various methods of landscape depiction and virtual adaptations. She also hopes to share and exchange ideas with other Artists and participants regarding her creative practice. Additionally, she plans to collect and incorporate other material such as sound, video, found objects and further sketches to compliment the collected drawings.
www.janice-jensen.deinstagram:janicejensen_
KARIN BRYGGER
SHORT BIO
Karin Brygger is a writer of 7 books and an artist. 2023 she releases a book of essays ”De blinda I Venedig” and her Scrolls Project will be a part of the group exhibition ”Lövhyddofesten” at Simrishamns Konsthall (vernissage 30 September). 2024 she will also release a book of Jewish female Heroines at Natur och Kultur with her co-writers Anneli Rådestad and Joanna RubinDranger (illustrator). Karin Brygger writes regularly in Judisk krönika, the only Jewish magazine in Sweden and can be heard holding service on Swedish National radio during the Jewish Holidays. Karin Brygger is an associate professor of Arts, Media and Storytelling at Skövde University. She holds a Master in Creative Writing and a Master in Literary Studies. She is working on her Phd. Literary Studies, Gothenburg University,, Sweden.PROPOSED WORK
Brygger will hold two walks for us that tight in to her research. The first one holds the working title "The Promenade" and the second one holds the title "Walking Jewish History". In addition she will join the group for program and continue to explore walking in her practice.
Studio 5
Sept 4-18
karinbrygger.com
SHORT BIO
Cecilia Lagerström is a director, researcher and professor of Performance practices at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Cecilia has a background in laboratory theatre and performance studies (PhD 2003) and she has been directing performance work in theatres and other venues since 1993. Her practice is moving between theater (often movement-based), performance art and artistic research. At the academy, Cecilia is head of subject for research and postgraduate education in Performance practices, she supervises and teaches doctoral students and master's students. Cecilia’s research interests include performance with a focus on site-creating and site-critical activities, physical performance training connected to directing and dramaturgy, decolonial aspects on place and body, performative writing and walking as art.
During 2013-16 Cecilia was conducting the project GångART together with actress and tight rope artist Helena Kågemark on walking in urban spaces where techniques and strategies from the theatre were applied on walking actions in the city of Gothenburg
Since 2020 Cecilia is engaged in the international collaboration The Kraken Skool of Finance, which examines the Nordic countries involvement in the transatlantic slave trade with the Caribbean, through performance, action and game-play. She is preparing a new project on the colonial sugar trade in Gothenburg studied through site-specific artistic investigations. Part of this is conducted within the research platform Hidden Sites, a collaboration between the Gothenburg City Museum and the Center for Critical Cultural Heritage Studies.
PROPOSED WORK
During the residency, I want to connect my previous work with walking as an attentive practice in the present with my current work with decolonial investigations of various (historical) sites.
https://www.gu.se/om-universitetet/hitta-person/cecilialagerstrom
AURIKE QUINTELIER
Aurike Quintelier is a visual artist and architect based in Ghent and Brussels, Belgium. Her practice has many layers, often working cross-disciplinary, and looks for the places where art and architecture meet. Driven by idealism and research while operating on a variety of scales, the projects vary between actual buildings/structures, and more conceptual projects. In the latter she uses art or architecture to express herself or to react to a topic she find intriguing (or enfuriating). Every project has a strong emphasis on experiment and exploration, trying to find a way to communicate. In function of the message, the medium changes; medium follows message.
The research Aurike is currently conducting, "Building Out Whispering. Con-structions on the Imagination of Place”, finds itself on the intersection of architecture and art. It explores the possibilities of how spatial interventions/integrations can engage with different aspects of place, space, environment, and make abstract topics such as climate change and its consequences discussable. Could these temporary interventions in a landscape help imagine the future identity of a place? Does our identity as humans shift? The project focuses on the symbiosis of human and nonhuman, where the human is considered part of nature, in opposition to the dualism inherent in western systems of thought. Aurike aims to reveal how all aspects of place are entangled (its history, geology, possible futures, eco-systems, etc.) in order to create structures that bring closer nature and culture
PROPOSED WORK
Proposed work: As a form of correspondence and dialogue, the aim is to create several smaller speculative spatial 'con-structions' in-situ, a form of world-building, that uncover existing interdependent relations in the landscape, in alliance with the community. I intend to walk as a form of connecting and corresponding with the Björkö environment and with community members, as well as a way to share my work with people. During a previous residency in Björkö Konstnod, the project "It matters what stories tell stories, friendly parasites", led to the act of the 'exhibitionwalk'. The walk was a performance to attempt to bring community members, who had been a huge part of the world-building practice, into the con-structing, into the world built. I aim to explore this method further, and use walking as a starting point and end point in the project, as a form of communication and connection
https://www.aurikequintelier.be
Studio
Oct 22-Nov 30
FERNANDA BRANCO
SHORT BIO
Fernanda Branco is a Brazilian performer, gardener and poet based in Norway. Working in the performance field, crossing boundaries between theatre, dance, film, and installation, facts, fiction and poetry. Currently a research fellow at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo, exploring embodied experiences of movement and voice in dialog with environments.
My walking practice relates to both natural and urban environments base on idea the that a day has potentially a gift to us.
The walk is a practice of being attentive to what comes to us during a walk, being then translated into a poetic text.
A preview practice consists of going for a walk every day for one year, taking a picture and writing a poem. All poems end with the place, forecast (weather, temperate, wind).
PROPOSED WORK
At AiR BKN residency I would like to develop this practice into a short film, with a collage of short daily images, now also collecting the environment’s sound together with a voice over from daily writing and forecast.
An ongoing practice of walking backwards will also be integrated into this project. My interested is by having images going backwards and how the practice of walking backwards influences how I think and write (by spoken words).
The walking backwards makes a dialog with the Aymara’s people cosmologies from Andean highlands of Peru where we walk backwards towards the future. When walking backwards, we can see the present and past – in front of us - while the future is unknown - in our back, where we go towards it.
Studio 15
Oct 2-9
JUANMA GONZALES
SHORT BIO
Juanma González is a Spanish artist who works and lives in Botkyrka.
His work combines experimental and traditional practices – drawing, photography, site-specific installation and art intervention. González uses walking as a method of knowledge and art production. Over the past 9 years, his research interests have been concerned with the act of walking as a practice for artistic production. He has developed walking projects and art exhibitions in Sweden, Finland, Norway and Spain. He received an MFA from the Royal Art Academy in Stockholm in 2016, and is a co-founder of artist-run collective Flat Octopus, where he curates art interventions in places outside the art circuit in Stockholm.
Recent exhibitions and projects include: LAND ART 2023 at Dikemark (Norway), I Skogen at Alsters Herrgård (2023, SE), Crosswalking in LA at Durden and Ray (2023, USA), Camiños Creativos at Museo Gaiás (2022, Spain) and Landscapes of other places at Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm 2022.
PROPOSED WORK
I aim to continue with my research-based process that I started for my stay at BKN in February. My findings by walking in the nature of Björkö led me to experiment with different materials and techniques. The result was a series of paintings and drawings titled Död Ved Ger Nytt Liv. Since then, this work has been developed on different contexts and materials. In Karlstad (Sweden), I built a labyrinth-form installation with wood collected in the surrounding forest following a poem composed by the Swedish writer Gustaf Fröding. "Du banar dig fram, du växer, du höjer dig fot för fot" (Jun’23) was part of I SKOGEN art exhibition at Alsters Herrgård supported by Värmland Kommun. For LAND ART 2023 in Dikemark (Norway), I created a second one, that took place in a former psychiatric hospital; “The healing labyrinth” (Aug’23) was made on organic matter collected in the surrounding gardens (mainly, leaves).
I would like to go back to Björkö to discover what is happening this time, in the fall. What kind of new findings will I get for my staying? How will a different session expire me for creating art? What is the next step in Död Ved Ger Nytt Liv series? What will it come up with after meeting and living with fellow walking artists?
There are sites on the island that I didn't explore. There are techniques that I would like to test on. There are histories that I want to listen to. There is a table where I want to share my food. There are steps that I want to walk on... All of this is on Björkö and, at the end of my residency, it becomes art.
Studio: 1
Dates: Nov 15-30
https://www.juanmagonzalez.com
WAP OCTOBER
JAMES CUNNINGHAM
SHORT BIO
I am an Australian performance movement video and networked performance artist working in social environmental and architectural surroundings exploring the limits of bodily perception performativity and the relationality of one’s self with others objects and environment.I have been co-Artistic Director (with Suzon Fuks) of Igneous Inc. since 1997. With Igneous I have co-choreographed and performed in stage shows performance-installations video-dance works and networked/online performances in festivals and cities around the world.Since 2007 I have been developing a durational stillness and conscious walking practice feeding into participatory performances and artworks. As part of that practice I enact ultra slow quiet walks in different environments capturing photographs and audio recordings that I later use to make photo-media artworks.
PROPOSED WORK
:At BKN I intend to capture and record while walking in and around the residency premises in the local area and further afield along the island’s eastern coastline on the Baltic Sea.In addition I would be happy to conduct a walkshop to share some of my processes with the community and/or other resident artists. Relating to embodied presence perception of the body in relation to the environment to intention and to shifting notions of embodiment of identity arising from stillness and various ways of walking.
ANNA MIKUSKOVA
SHORT BIO
Anna Mikušková grew up in the Czech Republic and is currently based in Alaska. She received an MA in English language and literature from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the Rochester Institute of Technology in NY. Before turning to visual art, Mikušková worked in the field of human rights focusing on services for immigrants and refugees. Her work frequently turns to themes of home, belonging, and the relationships we form with the environments we inhabit.
Her photographs and artist books have been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Griffin Museum of Photography in Massachusetts and the Anchorage Museum in Alaska. In 2022, she was included in the 2022 Silver List. Her essays were published in The Maine Arts Journal and in the British journal On Landscape. Currently, Mikušková teaches photography classes at the Wrangell Mountain Center in McCarthy, Alaska.
PROPOSED WORK
During the Walking as Practice, BKN Artist Residency Mikušková plans to continue her photographic exploration of the landscapes of the countries of the circumpolar North. Using primarily analog cameras and the process of walking, she will engage with the landscape of Björkö focusing on its boreal forests. The resulting images and datascapes (mapped routes of her walks) will become part of the project Not Far From Here, which reflects her experience of walking in the landscapes of the High North and addresses the themes of time, visual representation, and human activity on our planet. Additionally, while at BKN, Mikušková hopes to further integrate walking into her artistic practice and, through joint walks, conversations, and exchange sessions, deepen her knowledge of the countries of the circumpolar North and their unique perspectives and challenges.
mikuphoto.com
Studio: 3
Oct 2-16
JORDAN ROWE
SHORT BIO
Jordan Rowe (he/him) is a writer, curator and researcher on urban culture and rural identities with a particular interest in
institutions and placemaking. His co-curated exhibition ‘Doors of Learning: Microcosms of a Future South Africa’ opened at the Bauhaus Dessau in 2022 and an accompanying publication will be released on Spector Books in the summer of 2023. He was a member of the 2022 Constellations ° Cohort of Public Art Practitioners, a socially engaged curatorial development programme run by UP Projects, Flat Time House and the Liverpool Biennial. Jordan has previously served as the first ever Urbanist in Residence at the Museum of London, as a fellow at ZK/U Berlin, and as the manager of UCL’s Urban Laboratory. Recently based between London and Berlin, he has staged exhibitions and worked in various capacities with the Folkestone Triennial, Whitechapel Gallery, Stanley Arts, the ICA, Open City Documentary Festival, British Film Institute, De La Warr Pavilion, ICA, Somerset House, Free Word, and the University of Manchester. He is a regular contributor to talks, panels, roundtables and crits on the creative city, situated practices, night spaces, gentrification, the urban essay film, and queer urbanisms.
PROPOSED WORK
Coastal Narratives is an emerging project by urban researcher and curator Jordan Rowe, documenting a journey along the full length of the English coastline. The 2,700-mile hike of the partially completed England Coast Path is an attempt to understand shifting notions of English nationalism using walking as a methodology, and more broadly to consider 'Blackness' across a diversity of rural, littoral and urban landscapes. The residency at BKN is intended to refine the project’s goals and intended outputs through comparative research and collaborative conversation with other practitioners. In particular, I will focus my research on harassment and hostility in (White) European rural spaces, and work originating from the increasingly populated field of Black rurality studies.
Studio 1
Oct 2-31
SHORT BIO
Benedicte Dahm (1997) finished her master from the Art academy at UiB this spring, and is currently working between Oslo and Bergen. She works with drawing, sculpture, installations, maps/audio-walks, animations and printed matters.
In her practice she is interested in storytelling and how to combine local history with personal or fictional stories. She seeks to make visible the infrastructure around us, and how to use narratives to investigate our everyday objects, local stories and how we move and meet in public and private spaces.
In her recent project she was mapping the water system in Bergen, and created an audio-walk that followed the drinking water in a route around Bergen.
PROPOSED WORK
During the residency at BKN I will work on a new audio-walk and map, as well as experimenting with how to include animation or argumented reality in the walks.
At BKN I will test out different ways to map the area of Björkö and to research local history, which can be used in the audio walks.
I am also very curious about how other artist uses walking in their practice, and I am looking forward to learn more.
Studio 11
Oct 2-9
Bernardita Bennett is a Chilean visual artist and photographer. She has studied a Bachelor in Arts in Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and a Master in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies in Bauhaus Universität-Weimar. Her practice is based on the documentation of places in state of obsolescence to create memory archives. In other works she deals with home as a malleable and portable concept and structure. In her latest artistic practice she embodies through performance different ways of recording reality by walking, roaming and traversing in the urban and natural landscape. She currently lives and work in Berlin.
SHORT BIO
I am a self-taught artist from Boston (USA) but work internationally. Art has been my saving grace. As a result, the way that I make art is secretly just an evangelizing for the power of art. I don't really see art as something separate from living: art is just my effort to make the moment that we live in together, and all of its political and ecological traumas and inequities, feel transcendable.
PROPOSED WORK
I am drawn to and intrigued by Björkö Konstnod’s landscape and interested in how I might create descriptions of the internal and external discoveries I make while walking through it in a way that involves intertwining sound recordings and objects gathered while walking, with writing as a way of making experimental texts that can only be fully “read” by engaging the hands, the ears, the whole body… Basically I am working on finding ways to share understanding or to tell stories that let language dissolve into and return from nature, instead of replacing it. I am hoping to make object-stories that have artifacts from the environment they are describing embedded throughout them so that “reading” them includes experiencing their decomposition as part of their story.
http://www.heatherkapplow.com and http://doingnothingtogether.com
DIANNE REID
Dianne is a performer, choreographer, camera operator, video editor and educator, working in both live and screen contexts. She trained in Communication Studies (Drama) and then Dance at the South Australian College (now Uni SA), was a founding member of Outlet Dance in Adelaide (1987–89) and a member of Danceworks in Melbourne from 1990–95. From 2004-2006 she was Artistic Director of Dancehouse and a lecturer in contemporary dance and dance video at Deakin University (1996–2018). Dianne completed a creative practice doctorate in 2016 combining site specific performance, improvisation and interactive video projection into a form she describes as “live screen/dance.” After relocating to Adelaide in mid 2018 she completed the dance documentary “Nothing but bones in the way” which won the Best Dance Film award at the 15th Annual ReelHeART International Film and Screenplay Festival (Canada). In 2019 her new solo performance work “Cabin Fever” received 5-star reviews and won the Bank SA Weekly Award for Best Dance at both the 2019 and 2020 Adelaide Fringe Festivals. Since then Dianne has created a number of new screendance works including “Nest,” “Communal Bloom Strategy,” and the full-length biopic “Yesterday’s Skeleton."
PROPOSED WORK
I hope to weave a practice of walking and writing—inscribed in video images and physical encounters as well as in words. Working both alone and with others I hope to develop a map for allowing and imagining. Letting encounters between surfaces sing, laying across language, resting in rhythms, capturing contemplation, punctuating points of view. How can our bodies merge with and nurture landscape as it nourishes us in return.
My current walking practice grew out of a grief ritual and is transitioning into a writing practice. Over the past several months I began walking to make up for all the time spent sitting in a hospital room. Waiting for doctors, for diagnoses, for death. Then with the scattering of my mother’s ashes over a four-kilometre, two-hour wade in the ocean, it has become a daily connection to her but also to opening perception and potentials.
My practice as a dance and video artist has always honoured this idea of opening perception. I have created screendances and facilitated workshops which use the camera as witness, giving performers or participants the permission to enter into intimate range with other bodies or landscape. I draw on the tools of screendance in the improvising body. As camera, zooming, panning, blurring, and as montage, playing with the rhythms of cutting and transitioning. This dancing practice engages with duration in synergistic ways to walking practices.
www.hipsync.com.au
GERHARD KOWALD
SHORT BIO
I´m a freelance photographer, based in Salzburg, Austria. I studied painting and art education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. I have taught in my professional years as an arts, crafts and media teacher. For a couple of years I held a lectureship for media didactics at the Mozarteum University of Art, Salzburg. In parallel I have been developing my own photographic projects. My photographic education was self-taught and deepened in several workshops at Galerie Fotohof, Salzburg, as well as in the MasterClass at Galerie Anzenberger, Vienna.
My current photographic work deals with people in their living and working environment and revolves around the question of the extent to which social and economic changes affect the lives of individuals. Another focus of my photography is the critical inventory of the structural change of urban peripheries and rural regions as well as social and humanitarian issues such as migration and homelessness.
I have shown my photographic work in recent years in group and solo exhibitions in Salzburg and Vienna, Austria, as well as in Bologna, Italy.
PROPOSED WORK
Already last year I had the opportunity for a very inspiring artist residency at Björkö Konstnod. My focus at that time was a photodocumentary research about the residents of Björkö, who live on the island most of the year or permanently. I was able to meet a number of people, learned about their lives and their relationship to the island, and was also able to depict their living and working environments. For this work, I was largely on foot or by bicycle, and some of the encounters took place by chance as a result.
Looking back, I realize that I photographed mainly men and married couples, but only one single woman. In addition, the age distribution is conspicuously high, which means that younger people are also missing from the series. For this reason, I am glad to get the possibility to continue my project, now focusing on the younger generation and also on women, in order to be able to depict a representative cross-section of Björkö's inhabitants. I would stick to the rest of the concept, which is to meet the islanders on my walks, photograph them in their surroundings, and interview them about themselves and their lives on Björkö. Thus, parallel to the photo series, a text will also be created.
www.instagram.com/gerhard_kowald
Studio
Oct 2 - 31
CECILIA HEDLUND
SHORT BIO
In her practice Cecilia Hedlund works with the human relationship to nature. She works out in the landscape. Through researching into the human attitude to nature, reading Philosopher Bruno Latour, Researchers Alexander von Humboldt, Physicist Karen Barad in order to understand the human relationship to nature in greater depth, she also uses her practice to try natural processes of erosion, charcoaling, composting, oxidisation, and so on.
PROPOSED WORK
For me walking is about understanding the land, and not just traveling from one site to another. By walking I can gain an insight in how the landscape is formed as my feet carry me to where my interest leads me, and that is not necessarily the quickest route. Compared to traveling by bike or car, walking allows me to discover the landscape more in detail. Walking also allows me to perceive and experience nature by the use of my senses like sight, smell, hearing, touching. I find that when I start walking, my thoughts are all over the place, but by walking on and finding my own pace, my head is cleared and I can perceive the landscape to its full capacity. I use walking daily together with my dog to reach a certain state of mind that gives me space in my head to be creative. I create while I walk, and I walk to create.
If possible during my stay at the artist-in-residence, I would be interested in collaborating with other artists at the residency to do a sound walk based on sounds and stories picked up along the path or to do collective paintings and drawings made from and during the walks and from memories of the walks.
If collaboration is not possible on making artwork, then I would love to do the above work on my own. In that case I would also like to use photography in
the painting process, abstracting impressions during the walks, painting those abstract impressions and then photographing the paintings abstracting the same paintings, and so on.
ALEX HAWTHORN
SHORT BIO
Alex Hawthorn (b. 1986) (they/them) is an artist, composer, and technologist whose work flows between performance, installation, object-making, and sound-making. They use their work as a lens through which to investigate the natural world, specifically focusing on time: how we experience it, how we have codified it, and how we exist within it. Their work in theatrical sound design has garnered them an Obie award, LA Ovation Awards, and has been heard across North and South America, Australia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
As a non-binary interdisciplinary artist, Hawthorn is most comfortable outside prescriptive boxes, allowing their research and intuition to shape the form and medium of their projects. Most recently they’ve been focusing on writing, coding, and hiking.
PROPOSED WORK
During my week in residence, I will explore the diverse landscapes surrounding Björkö Konstnod and record long-format field recordings as a means of deepening my connection with the environment and providing a space for deep listening and reflection. The recordings will be used as the basis for an album of ambient music written during, and in response to, my time at Björkö Konstnod.
www.AlexHawthorn.com IG: @AFHawthorn
Studio 28
Oct 2-9
CLIFF ANDRADE
SHORT BIO
Cliff Andrade MA RCA (UK, b. 1982) uses drawing, printmaking, photography, moving image and walking to explore the effect of class and migration on our sense of identity and belonging. He is based at Spike Island Studios, Bristol, UK.
Cliff Andrade studied at the Glasgow School of Art before studying MA Print at the Royal College of Art, where he was the Tony Snowdon Scholar for 2018-2020. He also holds a degree in Economics & Politics.
A previous winner of the Jill Todd Photo Award, he has exhibited work at a variety of galleries including ArtHouse Jersey, St Helier (2022); RWA, Bristol (2020); Southwark Park Galleries (2020), and; Streetlevel Photoworks (Glasgow 2014).
Andrade works with a diverse and dynamic range of media, combining traditional printmaking, photography, time-based media and walking to explore notions that dominate his lived experience: belonging & unbelonging, place & memory, displacement, labour & poverty, hope & hopelessness and notions of family - and the emotional potency of the intersections between them all. He is particularly interested in the idea of ‘home’ and its importance to our sense of personal identity.
Cliff’s current research focus is on whether walking can act as a kind of ‘therapy’ for the trauma present in the themes of his work. His audio essay, Bristoler Chronik explores his approach to walking and the ideas it allows him to explore.
Cliff is a Tutor and Lecturer at Bristol School of Art and Cardiff School of Art.
PROPOSED WORK
- through discussion, continue to learn more about the walking experiences of others
- share his experiences and ideas about walking, refining those ideas in the process
- walk in a physical, and social, landscape which is completely unknown to him
- place notions he has of walking in Sweden, particularly in regards to ideas of wilderness, against the reality of experience
Conscious of the danger of solipsism in his walking practice, this opportunity is crucial to allow him to create dialogues with others.
SOUND WALKSBristoler Chronik >>>
WAP 23 studio and accommodation is made possible with support from Region Stockholm.