Åsa Elzén
Åsa Elzén
Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration
or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge /
Skogen kallar – Ett oändligt kontaminerat samarbete eller
Dansandet är en form av skogskunskap
– Extension #2 at The Experimental Field, Accelerator, SU
– Extension #1 In Forest Intervals
Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth /
Träda – Fogelstadgruppen och jord
– A Growing Fallow Archive / Ett växande träda-arkiv
– Biography of a Fallow / En trädas biografi
– Transcript of a Fallow / Avskrift av en Träda
– Fogelstad Fågelstad Fågelsta Fågelholk Fågelbo
– The Other School / Den andra skolan
– A Growing Archive on the Women’s Barn and Livestock
School at Fogelstad / Ett växande arkiv över Kvinnliga
Ladugårdsutbildningen vid Fogelstad
– A Step to the Side / Ett steg åt sidan
– A Growing Peace with the Earth Collection
– Transcript of Transcripts: Elin – Bang /
Avskrifter av avskrifter: Elin – Bang
– Why do things when you could leave it? – An attempt,
an in-between land / Varför gör man saker då man kunde
låta bli? – Ett försök, ett gränsland
While I am trying to get to know Fredrika, I am always
– Memory of an Event I (Dear Honorine / Dearest Signe)
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian journey 1795 re-traced
YES! Association / Föreningen JA!
– A New Spelling of a Street – A tribute to Audre Lorde
– All that you touch You Change. All that you Change
– (art)work(sport)work(sex)work
– Zyklische Gesellschaftsreise
...
above and below (from top down):
Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge, detail
The forest by lake Aspen, Axel Fredriksson photographed at Fogelstad during the 1920s and 30s, Nordic Museum Archives
Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge, detail
A gathering in the hillside by a forest, participants in the Women Citizen's School at Fogelstad, photographer and year unknown, Women's History Collections, Gothenburg University Library
Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge, detail
map of Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge, Swedish Forest Agency 2019
Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge |
Skogen kallar – Ett oändligt kontaminerat samarbete eller
Dansandet är en form av skogskunskap
Public art commission in collaboration with Malin Arnell within the framework of Local Art Projects funded by Statens Konstråd / Public Art Agency Sweden, 2019 – ongoing
In Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge the possibilities to, through an artistic-juridical intervention, take a bit of forest out of production are explored, as a means to secure its agency and survival in infinite future. The forest is 3,7 hectares in the form of a triangle, and is located at Fogelstad Estate’s grounds, close to lake Aspen in Julita, Katrineholms Municipality. A 50 year long lease has recently been signed as a first step in this commitment.
According to today’s definitions and regulations the forest is classified as a production forest. The lease makes it possible to take the forest out of production and let it live on instead of being clearcut according to the forestry plan. Before the end of the lease agreement, 2069, the forest could thus be defined as an ”old-growth forest with high biodiversity” and considered worthy of preservation. Unlike a nature reserve, which usually aims to ”protect” a fragile environment, we wish, through this artistic shift and framing, to make possible an ambiguous exploration of our complex, planetary, reciprocal interdependence.
Part of the forest was planted during farmer Elisabeth Tamms time as owner of Fogelstad. Some of it, in particular as part of the scattered swamps, was already there, evolving for a long time. Together with pedagogue Honorine Hermelin, workplace inspector Kerstin Hesselgren, physician Ada Nilsson and writer Elin Wägner, she founded the Fogelstad group in 1921. The group came together through the common struggle for peace, democracy and women’s suffrage. They ran a.o. the Women Citizen’s School at Fogelstad (1925–54) and published the political weekly periodical Tidevarvet (The Epoch). The Fogelstad group and the large network around them was an early queer community with rural Fogelstad making up their centre and refuge. The group was politically engaged but independent of any political party, and strongly committed to ”jordfrågan” (”the agricultural question”), that today can be understood as being part of a larger discussion regarding social, economical and ecological resilience.
The forest becomes a monument — an on-going, transformative, performative public artwork. When the forest is understood as a public artwork it is lifted out of its predetermined context and becomes a kind of resistance to the Western teleological concept of time. The forest lives on in a different temporality, where a time axis from the Fogelstad group and their struggle for ”peace with the earth” is allowed to continue instead of being broken through clearcutting. By allowing the forest to remain, the anthropocentrically predetermined, profit-driven temporality that the forest is part of today, is instead broken.
Forest calling writes itself into an assemblage of relationships, contaminated collaborations and processes with their own temporalities, that help us to comprehend time of different speed, formation and scope, as one of the largest obstacles to grasp the vast range of climate destruction is our inability to comprehend different, simultaneous on-goings.
Forest calling also harbors a number of choreographed intra-actions with the intention to create meetings among the forest’s multitude of life forms, histories and relationships that enables practicing ”a mutually sustainable relating”. Thereby Forest calling provides space for different desires and dependence formations. We imagine a queer continuum, or a continuum of ecosocial desire. Desires in the forest, desires within contaminated collaborations, and among more-than- human life forms, our desire to be part of a larger time-space and to a different future.
Sometimes Forest Calling reaches out in various ways through extensions. Read more under Extension #1 and Extension #2
read more at Public Art Agency (Swe)
listen to interview by Maryam Fanni, Public Art Agency (Swe)