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Coast, Line

Coast, Line is a Multispecies Ethnography workshop that will use improvisation to consider the biopower of nonhumans and the ways in which they sense and shape their worlds. Grounded in Futurefarmers’ engagement with the village of Digermulen on the Lofoten islands, participants of this workshop will undergo a reverse experiment in which the human becomes marine in an attempt to think towards the potentials for cohabitation and “cross-species kinship”. Focus will be placed on the politics of seaweed as a “newly promised bio-economy”, and with performative investigations in public settings, participants will explore the ephemeral movements and forgotten histories and politics of the sea. Here, “lines” will be considered in relation to writing, theatre, mapping, weaving, coding, rules, and legislation.

Futurefarmers is an international constellation of artists, activists, researchers, farmers and architects who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organisation of space. Founded in 1995, Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems, to visualise and understand their intrinsic logics, and to offer more sustainable alternatives. These include food systems, public transportation, and education. Amy Franceschini is the founder of Futurefarmers. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University in Photography and her MFA from Stanford University. Lode Vranken received his master’s in a UN Course on Human Settlements and Architectural Philosophy from the KU Leuven, Belgium.

Janice McEwen holds degrees in Cultural Studies and Fine Arts. She has worked in New Zealand, the U.K. and Australia, where she spent 14 years on cultural development projects with salt water Indigenous people in coastal communities, mostly in Arnhem Land. Her present interest is in Celtic cultures and earth based philosophies and belief systems and she is currently involved in a collaborative arts project on Cross-species Kinship with Michele O’Connor Connolly, around the Kelp Forest in Bantry Bay West Cork.

Janna Holmstedt is a Stockholm-based artist and researcher affiliated with the Posthumanities Hub. She works with various media and contexts, ranging between installation, sonic fiction, mapping, walking, writing and performance with a particular interest in listening and storying, as she explores entangled issues such as interspecies communication, multispecies relations, and the intra-action of bodies, environs and technology. In her PhD, Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening (Lund University, 2017) she focused on sonic ecologies, ocean life, and sound technology. Her current work involves an attention to soil care, the allotment movement, and the cultivation of maize.

Sergey Kostyrko is an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University. His research area covers the different aspects of mechanics and thermodynamics of thin film materials. In recent years, Kostyrko has been actively working as a sound artist with a focus on science and bio-art projects. He is also a musician working in the field of improvisational and noise music. Between 2013 and 2017, he was one of the curators of Spina!Rec cassette label. At present, he is a member of Global Young Academy, where, together with Alexander Kagansky, they lead the art and science working group and ArtSci Nexus platform organised by curator Candace Goodrich and biochemist John LaCava.

Alexander Kozachek is an artist / designer living and working in San Francisco. He holds an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts. Recently he has been responding to and experiencing the wind and sky. Within this territory Kozachek explores everything from ecological issues and regulations in the sky to working on the creation of speculative data sets generated from interactions with the wind. In assessing the work, he often asks himself the question: does it fly?

Julia Lohmann is a Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design. She investigates and critiques the ethical and material value systems underpinning our relationship with flora and fauna. Julia’s research interests include critical practice and transition-design, bio materials, collaborative making, museums and residencies, embodied cognition and practice as research. As designer in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013, she established the Department of Seaweed, an interdisciplinary community of practice exploring the marine macroalgae’s potential as a design material. She holds a PhD in Innovation Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art, London.

Julia Parks is an artist working with moving image, animation, and photography. Her practice often uses a series of photographs and projected 16mm film. Through these mediums, she explores the relationships between landscape, place, people, plants and industry, often focusing on the west-coast of Cumbria in Northern England. In April 2018 her work was featured on BBC Countryfile where she demonstrated how to develop 16mm film using locally collected seaweed from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria.

Danni Zuvela is a curator, writer and artist working in Melbourne and the Gold Coast, Australia. With Joel Stern, her work as Artistic Co-Director of Liquid Architecture, the national sound art organisation, has explored questions of sound and listening as a social practice in contemporary art. Her lecture-performances draw on her academic background and research-based curatorial practice, centring questions of ecology, community memory and non-human subjectivity in discursive art projects often taking place in non-institutional sites and contested landscapes. Danni’s current and ongoing research explores the relations between earth-based knowledge and aquatic narratives; listening non-human others; and experimental gastronomy, future foods and myco-geography as modes of social organisation.

Alexander Rishaug is a sound artist and composer working in the field in between the art and the experimental music scene. Rishaug creates site-specific sound projects that investigates time, memory, space/place and acoustics through the use of extended field recording techniques and advanced speaker technology, analogue synthesizers, computers and generative sound manipulations. This has led to numerous performances, art projects and collaborations within the field of sound art, contemporary music, visual art, film, dance and theatre. Rishaug has been releasing albums for international labels such as: Asphodel, Smalltown Supersound, Melektronikk, Lucky Kitchen, Jester Records, Rune Grammofon, Freakout Cult, Enlightenment, Cronica Electronica, Eilean records and Tapeworm.

Coast, Line shared their research insights under the Public programme during the Kelp Congress.