How to collaborate with a blueberry?

While making these works I have been thinking about animation and ecology, how we relate to our environment through art, how power structures are contested or confirmed in image creation. Its about ecology and how the relationship between human and environment transform and its about how animation practices possibility to offer a vide variety in exploring that relationship. I have developed this text in a process of improvised lectures which I held for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possibleentitiesin the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues.

As a artist, teacher, animator I’ve been thinking more and more about how work is organized. I believe that how I teach or make art is at the essence. As an artist and activist I’ve been involved in environmental and climate issues for more than fifteen years. In the research project Animated Ecology I took as startingpoint my daily practices in order to investigate different ways of relating to and being part of my environment.

What I love about teaching is how I always see new things in what I teach with new student/audiences. Lecturing as a way of listening. So I began the project by improvising lectures for various audiences I wanted to have input from. I have lectured to all possible entities in the ecosystem I am a part of, from blueberries to colleagues to films. Finally I gathered these improvisations in a 20 minute lecture dedicated to the images that first triggered the ideas to the different improvisations. It is presented here as the video essay Being Animated and also available in text form (swedish & english).

Mindmapping is another approach always present in my projects. This time the mind map gradually evolved into a ecosystem map over natural elements that take on active roles, sampled from different animated films. Wolf Wind Stone Shudder is a animated eternal loop constantly circulating the elements.

In the process I have reflected on how power structures are contested or confirmed in different kinds of image making. How the relationship between human and environment is transformed and how animation practices offer me a wide variety when exploring and expanding that relationship. In the work Greening Cells & Reding Cells I reenact the analogue animation technique of painting on transparent cell sheets. Inspired by cellanimation’s graphic elements for expressing powers in objects I made these series of paintings that makes an image by merging with its environment, letting it shine through its trancparencies.