MARGRETHE PETTERSEN

Walking, talking, divining and listening: future mapping a connected world

When I meet the artist at the end of February 2023 to discuss their project, they tell me that the work is in flux and is supposed to remain in flux, continuously unsettled and purposefully formless like the underground stream they are trying to make audible through conversations, sound walking, divining rods, hydrophone technology, fictional mappings and rituals of listening to our surroundings and ourselves. These tools and interventions are at once the method and content of their work which focuses on a hidden river at Jeløya that was put underground a long time ago and now flows through a pipe along an invisible path. It is this unseen and inaudible river which the artists are trying to sense, map, make thinkable and thus followable to its entry into the sea. Apparently the municipality has plans to unearth the stream, and in that sense the work performs art as speculative future fiction and collaborative ritual to help move it above ground now.

As art work, Conversations with what runs deepfinds precedents and kinship with other works concerned with rivers, such as Annea Lockwood’s field recording compositions of the Danube, Kate Carr’s sonic exploration of the river Sherbourne, or Leah Barclays interactive river listening. Through these references it can be read as art. However, it also finds an additional kinship with the diffusive existence of mushroom spores, the circular rings of trees, the layerings of humus, and the porous nature of bodies. Here the work is focused on being with nature. It does not claim to be an art work but an access point to a relational ecology, proposing a practice-based eco-feminism, where art and nature meet and invite us to explore ourselves and our surroundings through our shared existence. This in turn makes art an element of eco-feminist undertakings, reframing the artists named above within its venture and forming an unsettled but continuous cycle of art, nature, care, collaboration and environment.

Conversation is an essential part of Pettersen and Solberg Dolmen’s work. Therefore, when we meet, we enter into a conversation about their involvement between bodies, water, mushrooms, soil and knowledge, and come to talk about their practice as a layering of possibilities. These possibilities can be understood within Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s advocacy for a layered thinking and doing as a form of disturbance, which she considers ‘a good tool with which to begin the inconsistent layering of global-and-local, expert-and-vernacular knowledge’. In Conversations with what runs deepsuch disturbances are caused by our participation. Walking, talking, divining, listening and future mapping, we are generating the work by disturbing norms and assumptions, sites and materials, which brings us, following Tsing, into heterogeneity. This heterogeneity in turn presents as a key lens for understanding landscapes as a cosmology of shared layers, of ourselves and the environment, making a conjoined world. The artists, like Tsing, offer ‘stories built through layered and disparate practices of knowing and being’. They invite us to practice these stories and add to the layers through our bodies and possibilities. Thus, layers of humus, water, mushrooms, bodies, mappings and histories produced by walking, talking, and divining, become layers of narration that create plural truths about a river that we cannot see.

Accordingly, the unsettled and fluid nature of Pettersen and Solberg Dolmen’s work does not serve to exclude the audience or to appear esoteric and removed from the gallery context. To the contrary, its formless openness is the very basis of our layered and layering engagement. We too, as walking, talking, listening beings, follow the fictional map which makes a work that we are part of. We are not looking at nature or art but are invited into a sense of being with: a being as a being with human and more-than-human bodies, simultaneously part of nature and the artwork as nature. The artists describe their interest in collaboration as a means to hold back egos, to keep voices in the plural, to make a choir rather than a work. Consequently, their collaboration of two is but the starting point for a larger gathering and an invitation for us to join in and bring plural voices to the inaudible river, to start to hum and talk and walk and sound its hidden and silenced gurgling in our sound of gathering that is a conversation as work and its communication as nature at the same time.

An important element of this engagement for Pettersen, whose work in nature and art is informed also by her Sámi heritage, is asking for permission. She describes it as asking and subsequently thanking nature when making a fire for example, as an expression that comes from a deep gratitude and sense of living withrather than ofthe land. This demonstrates as humility and gratitude before nature and in extension and in this context before art as an expression that is not about human authorship but about relationships and collaborations with everything. In this sense the work, or the process of working rather, is a merger of cultures: Norwegian culture and Sámi culture, which adds complexity and demands respectfulness within an art context and institution that often involves exploitation, that of artists and curators, who try to fend of precarity on a ‘fast-moving (art) world conveyor belt’, as well as of resources, built as it is historically on slavery and contemporaneously on oil and high finance.

The inclusion of respectfulness and gratitude resonates with and rewrites also the title of the biennale Momentum 12 itself, “Together as to gather”, in that it practices the work together and articulates gathering not as an extractive grasping, collecting and a hegemonic consolidation, but as a fluid and relational holding together, which implies care and accountability. In this sense I understand this asking for permission as a sense of response-ability, Donna Haraway’s ecology of practice that cultivates a collective from the ability to respond: from the contingent relating between human and more than human bodies with all voices audible.

Central to this initiation into a grateful and non-extractive attitude of viewing and listening to art, as an important part and concern of the artists, is the staging of the work through a respectful and ethical participation. At the moment of our last communication the artists had dismissed more sculptural, permanently visible elements, and had found a focus on mapping as well as scoring, walking and talking as invitations into the doing of the work together. In that sense participation is not simply the performance of more permanent, autonomous and visible elements of the work, but is the work in its fluid and unsettled production. This throws up important questions about what a work is and about participatory practices more generally: how do we take part in a work that is not there if we do not participate? And, how can a work communicate the different modes of taking part?

The task is to make accessible the river that stands more generally for the figure of nature, and to make accessible the work as well as the gallery that stand more generally for the figure of art, together. To make them thinkable through each other and in an expanded way. This desire to think one through the other, the forest through the gallery, the map through the river, and to walk through listening, and so on, reveals a central conundrum of the work: how to make the invisible visible and thinkable without making it graspable in the neoliberal sense of extractable, functional, anthropocentric and useable? In other words, how to make a work a gathering, as in a meeting of human and more-than-human bodies, without the aim or inadvertent outcome of collecting, valuing, and organizing into a taxonomical and grasping thinking.

How to avoid what Dylan Robinson calls a “Hungry Listening” and a settler’s ear, that does not listen contingently but extractively for meanings it already knows to hear; that ‘prioritizes the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch and texture of sound’, of everything. This conundrum frames Pettersen’s stated desire to access her own heritage through art making. To step into her roots by working nature through the artistic paradigm of participation and collective gathering without losing the contingent relationality in a consolidated representation in the gallery space, whose white walls stand in representation of an art world organized horizontally: along lines of profit, canonical histories, exploitation, commodification and their universalization in a global aesthetics, rather than along vertical lines into contingent rituals and roots. The aim is not to judge, neither the work nor nature, but to take part: to enter a dialogue from one through the other and back; to query their relationship in the relationality of rivers and of sound, so that maybe we could quite naturally come to understand and sense gratitude rather than simply performing it.

In that sense, this particular collaboration between the two artists is an extension of their previous singular and collective practice of art as ecological work: dyeing with mushrooms, planting seeds, stitching and fabrics, making paper, being in conversation, and generally of sharing and generating knowledge through material interactions and embodiment: bringing together the fluid sense of water and the tacit sense of soil, to draw a layered world that shows us our connectedness.

Text by Salomé Voegelin

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