The Conference of the Birds

Really excited that my project co-curated with Heli Aaltonen has received Oppstart funding from Nordic Culture Point! This means that 10 great people are able to meet on Engeløya from the 8th-the 13th of June to shape this project and bring it into the world.

The Conference of the Birds is an interdisciplinary and socially engaged art project focusing on the loss of birds. Birds are messengers of environmental problems. Only in Europe, 421 million birds have disappeared during the last 30 years. We want to create a travelling, art-based exhibition that migrates northwards, like the birds. This will manifest as a series of community-based events in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland and North-Russia. We want to move minds, awaken knowledge, joy, empathy and awareness of birds and create a bridge between aesthetics, research, thought and action. We wish to reach as many people as possible and create intergenerational, intercultural and interdisciplinary meeting points to exchange knowledge and stories about birds across generations and geographical boundaries. The idea of entangled empathy and need of co-existence, that evokes a felt awareness of the web of relationships in which we live, lays the foundation of the project.