IN-Environments (working title)_ An Artist Residency in the North of Sweden

IN-Environments is a new collaborative project by photographer and filmmaker Christian Kipp and dance artist and researcher Sara Wookey. The project considers ways to make visible and felt the ways in which we come into contact with and create relations with spaces and places we reside in – both the natural and built environment – through our bodily movements, gestures and senses as we interact with other humans and non-humans. It begins by asking, what do we bring to and how are we changed by our environs? It begins in the Laplands, a new and dynamic space for us both.

Our two-week artist residency at iM Konsthall in Moskosel, a small village situated in the far North of Sweden is founded by the engineer and a dance artist couple, Gonçalo Marques and Linda Remahl. Having first met in England, they followed their wish to return to this village, not far from where Linda’s grandmother lived, and begin a community engagement project with local and international creatives. They have purchased a former schoolhouse in the village and re-designed the two-story building that includes a former gymnasium, dance studio and other spaces for working and living with future ambitions to create a locally sourced restaurant and a conference site.

We were invited to create a new work for a mobile gallery that will tour in the north (Norrbotten) and connect with local audiences. This project, as well as the Konsthall, is part of Northern Sustainable Futures (NSF), an initiative promoting sustainable processes of development across the region. Working together in 2020 on the Arts Council England-funded project A New Role for Dance in which qualities of dance – care, courage, empathy, play and resiliency – as a practice might be made visible and considered in terms of our current contemporary moment.  During this residency, we will work with  human movement, image, sound and film in and around the residency site take one quality per day as our guide.

It has been encouraging to read James Bridle’s Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence (2020) who makes a case for intelligence as relational – an entanglement of relations between self, each other and non-human world, including machines. He argues that Artificial Intelligence can be a catalyst for expanding our limited beliefs in and definitions of ‘intelligence’. It is all around us, he claims, and there is nothing artificial about it. So, we enter this space with an openness to all of the qualities of knowing around us, bringing forth our own enjoyable entanglement with all that we encounter. We are interested in highlighting the intelligence, or ways of knowing, that comes through dance.

We look forward to sharing more with you here and thanks for visiting.

Christian Kipp & Sara Wookey

www.christiankipp.com  /  www.sarawookey.com

References

https://www.northernsustainablefutures.com/

https://sublimemagazine.com/weaving-creative-ecologies-around-the-arctic-circle/

https://jamesbridle.com/books/ways-of-being