BERG DUO - move between studio based practice and the outdoor. Walking is an integral part of their practice. The work intersects lens and embodied practices, towards reconfigurations of subjectivity by visualizing possible futures. Concepts of in-between and the state of becoming are central in their artistic research (embodied, spoken, text, visuals, audio).
BERG DUO started in 2023 Anna Viola Hallberg & Ami Skånberg they have followed each other's practices since 2005. They are based in Stockholm/Gothenburg/Björkö, Sweden. This exposition is reflecting joint work.
Walking Workshop "Walking is Aso Space" >>>
Korpoström, Finland, 2023
WAP24 Spaces of Anticipation, highlights how walking serves as a tool for deep engagement with both the landscape and its historical narratives. The emphasis on anticipation creates a compelling framework for artists to explore their surroundings with fresh eyes, inviting spontaneity and creativity.
Walking is Also Space – Walking Beyond Distance
Abstract: to be revised
This text disseminates the practices and knowledges derived from our workshop Walking is also Space, created as part of the One By Walking research group Empathetic Trails in Korpoström, Finland April 2023. Methodologies in choreographic and artistic practices were unfolded in order to raise awareness, embodied memory, and narratives on disregarded or unfamiliar spaces. The theoretical realm leans towards sociologist Doreen Massey’s claim that spaces are never static; they transform as we move with and through them. Thus, walking is also space, and our aim is joining effort to keep shared space possible through attentive walking.
Describing the structure of the workshop, as well as what the workshop engendered, the text unpacks (re-, de-, un-) conditional walking through spatial agency, personal memory and responsibilities towards participatory walking as embodied agency and sustainable awareness.
Onebywalking.net publisher: Lexington/Rowan & Littlefield in the Environment and Society series. 2025
Walking As Practice/WAP is a process-based program at AiR BKN in Norhtern Stockholm Archipelago, where we delve into each others’ knowledges and things we encounter together. Interventions weave across different registers of time and site. The focus is on how walking is interlocked in our practices. Fieldworks and seminars are jointly done to locate and entangle structures, narratives and forces. We believe in a safe and friendly attitude as part of the art scene we share. BKN fosters a peer-based environment: “thinking together, learning together” - a resource and semi- public forum to explore and experiment. Jointly, we form a transformative, dynamic space for art that engages with life and nature towards critical and poetic explorations, influenced by the immediate surroundings; the forest, lakes, sea and people living in the rural area. Program dissemination will be in an online format and a series of open studios/walks as engagement with the local community.
The walking scene in Sweden is in the forming or resurfacing. The purpose with this process-based program is to invite (inter)national artists to further this development together with a core-group connected to Björkö Konstnod/BKN. WAP methodology of fieldworks and share sessions are carried out to locate and entangle structures, narratives and forces via the intersection of the arts and walking.
The curatorial framework opens up for participating artists to influence the direction, and leans towards posthumanism and new materialism, i.e. rethinking dualisms through a non-hierarchal approach. Reviewing the development (share sessions, walks, and work made available to public), Spaces of Anticipation is the theme for WAP24. We also foresee that after WAP24, the platform could continue to focus on aspects of artistic research at the cusp of walking and the arts. In 2023, the focus was on Attentive Walking. In 2024 they formed WAP Collective/WAPC
Keywords: walking, asymmetry, entanglement, beyond violence, not-knowing, desire, nature, responsibility, deep listening, close seeing, territory, contested sites
BERG DUO are the curators and instigators of WAP/Walking As Practice. It stems from the workshop Walking is Also Space the duo did in Korpoström Finland. At BKN they are sharing studio. BKN is the site for WAP23 and WAP24.
Berg Duo is part of the research group OneByWalking Network, for collaboration, discussion, and experimentation within the area of research methodologies concerned with walking, as well as experimental, scientific and art-based work related to walking methodologies.
For OneByWalking, we were invited to create a workshop with walkers and observers- Walking is Also Space. The workshop accentuated relational strategies of creating and sharing space. Methodologies in artistic practices were unfolded in order to raise awareness on disregarded or unfamiliar spaces. The workshop Walking is Also Space emerges originally from choreographer Molissa Fenley’s postmodern ideas about space, and about movement memories that are buried in our bodies. It is an elaboration of space reflecting the mix of geographical environments that constitutes spatial memory. We also lean towards sociologist Doreen Massey’s important claim that spaces are never static; they transform as we move with and through them. Thus, walking is also space.
Berg Duos submission to OneByWalking's first anthology holds the title Conditional Walking
Background image commissioned drawing/Map of Korpoström fileld/Choreography notation of workshop conducted by Jesse D. Peterson as part or workshop Walking is Space
WAKING AS PRACTICE
program and public outreach
WAP instigated by Ami Skånberg and Anna Viola Hallberg (BERG DUO) in 2023 as an air program. It took place on Björkö in Sweden between September and November.
In 2024 John Schuerman and Antonia Aitkens were invited as Co-Curator for one month each. Additional artists were coming to BKN/Björkö Konstnod (Art Node) during the year to walk as practice.
WAPC/Walking As Practice Collective is a group of artist with an interest of transgressing through spaces and by this process rethink and criticize structural binds. With this they are putting forward norm critiques and proposes distribution of agency by deploying acts of vulnerability as strategy for building togetherness. >>>
WAP/Walking As Practice on BKN >>>
Exposition WAP23 >>>
Exposition WAP24 >>>
2024 - - - - -
Unfollow
Relay based international walking score series initiated.
First three scores performed and writen by artists: Berg Duo, Rebekah Dean, Nahelli Chavoya
Open air exhibition
"The Sky is Moving Sideways"
Date: Sept 1-9
Venue: Stephens House & Gardens, London (uk)
A sculpture trail by curator Rebekah Dean. BERG DUO presents “Sculpture You”.
Screenings and Festivals
See project Current for listing
Congress
UNMADNESS in "Black-Market. Truths: Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness" At World Congress on Philosophy, Rome, Italy with working group in Performance Philosophy, Aug 1-8 >>>
Field trip
Japan, to make Afloat Tokyo, Kyoto, Kumano Kodo etc June 27-July 30, 2024
Curatorial
WAP24 - Spaces of Anticipation through out the year with two focus periods.
WAP24 June Edition Lead walker and co-curator: John Schuerman is an environmental artist and independent curator. WAP24 September Edition Lead walker and co-curator: Antonia Aitken based in lutruwita /Tasmania, Australia since 2014. >>>
Anthology
Berg writes the text Conditional Walking for academic publication of the first anthology for OneByWalking Network
2023 - - - - -
Sept-Nov Walking As Practice, BKN, Björkö, Sweden (curators residency program)>>>
October, Fakk the System, Berlin Punk Film Festival (screening) >>>
Field Trip
Indonesia to make Current
Exhibitions
August-September, Becoming Landscape + Suriashi For Bonn, DasEssZimmer - Raum für Kunst+ in Bonn, Germany. (solo exhibition Hallberg including BERG works Consequencesand Fakk The Sistem) >>>
June-August, Trickle-Art in the River, Norrtälje Sweden. (Hallberg curator and Skånberg participated with two performances Suriashi for Norrtälje and Territory both as installations and live performance. )
May, fieldwork & research, Java, Indonesia
April workshop Walking is Also Space, in Korpoström Finland with One by Walking Network.
"Working at the intersection of lens and embodied practices - we are interested in movement and space within and beyond language, and ask how movement can bring spaces together, and how several spaces can be made into one, through embodiment. As time collapses, space is put at the forefront of our artistic research." BERG DUO
ADDITIONAL PROJECT INDONESIA
Title: FAKK THE SISTEM
Trt: 16:45:00
Year: 2023
Media: 4K
Language: English, Swedish, Indonesian
Subtitles: English or French
Codec: mp4 with aac sound
Formats: Available in requested format for screenings and festival
Keywords: archival activism, video essay, short documentary, punk, indonesia, sweden,fan film, intersectional
For preview contact BUJI STUDIO: amimaisha (at) gmail.com
Shown at Berlin Punk Film Festival + DasEsszimmer, Bonn 2023
The short documentary covers part of the vibrant Bandung Punk Scene in 2023. Three bands,three full songs and some behind-the-scenes-material. It was the circumstances (screendance and curatorial) that took us to Indonesia. In addition, we allocated two half days to the Punk scene in Bandung. We had promised to provide some material from Indonesia to a documentary being made about Anti Cimex. For this we had two days. In addition to the material we collected for the Gothenburg-based director, we ended up with a material being more of a personal exploration of the punk scene, and decided to do a short documentary of our own. Our quest was
to search for the imprint of the Swedish punk group Anti Cimex in today's Indonesian punk scene from the point of view of Skånberg's performance persona. The project is made in cinéma-vérité tradition.
History writing as we have known it, frequently generates stories to maintain society - this with its limitations that revolves on normalcy. Parts of society are left out, where some individuals are perceived as different and other. Hierarchies create a binary between the normal and the alternative. Both artists have in their practice worked with legacy and the topic of audiovisual memory for the future. However, more so through an imprint of political contingencies, experiences and the energy of the selected group. Ami Skånberg reconnected with her personal relation to Anti Cimex, and her bass playing brother in the band for the first time in 2017, in The Laughter of Medusa: a two and a half-hour solo performance on stage, facilitating filmed, narrated and archival footage. Through Skånberg's Screendance practice, she got in touch with The Bandung International Dance film Festival in 2013. Her films THE DANCE OF THE SUN and WALLFLOWER were screened there in 2013 and in 2017. Hallberg was on a curatorial mission in Indonesia May 2023. The couple decided to take the opportunity to trace the influence of Anti Cimex in Bandung.
A number of questions appeared. Who are the punks in Indonesia? What are they concerned about? Several issues such as mental health, deforestation and gender inequalities were discovered.
FAKK THE SISTEM is a stand alone 16 min documentary built on a personal exploration of the traces of Anti Cimex primarily in Bandung, hence contacts were generated with Punks visiting the city from Borneo, Jakarta and Sumatra. Hallberg and Skånberg are curious to continue the roadtrip into a full length documentary on the state of mind of resistance and freedom fight in Indonesia. This put in perspective with the conditions of the Swedish government supported rehearsal spaces for young bands in the 1990s is something the artists reflect over. How is this linked to forming a youth that is engaged with the construction of present and future societal systems? FAKK THE SISTEM is not only a fan movie, or a legacy movie of Anti Cimex it is also a brief insight to what the Bandung punk scene looks like in 2023.
SCREENINGS
Berlin Punk Film Festival 2023
DasEssen Zimmer in exhibition Becoming Landscape, Aug 2023
CURRENT
Creates layers of time through dance improvisation - in between reality and fiction - performed as a ritual for resistance in a place where rice fields, fish ponds and gardens currently are replaced by fancy buildings and crowded highways. Current is a visual journey of ancestral life and biopolitics.
Title: Current
Trt: 08:20 (10.05)
Genre: video essay, non verbal, documentary, screen dance, visual anthropology
Media: 16:9, 4K 3840x2160, color, sound
Format: Available in requested format for screening and festivals
Language: non verbal
Produced: 2024
Concept, Directors Producers: Berg Duo
On location: May 2023, Ciganitri, West Java, Indonesia
Dance/Choreography: Ami Skånberg (SE)
Video Editing & Director of Photography: Anna Viola Hallberg (SE)
Concept & Producers: BERG
Music: Mats Skånberg (SE)
Guest appearance: Alfiyanto Wajiwa (ID)
Keywords: ecopolitics, water protection, activism, ecoperformance, gentrification, biopolitics, ancestral, Ciganitri, West Java, Indonesia, video essay
Current is a screendance piece made in the village Ciganitri, West Java. It is an encounter between four spaces, two dancers and a camera during two afternoons. Current creates layers of time through dance improvisation - in between reality and fiction - performed as a ritual for resistance in a place where rice fields, fish ponds and gardens currently are replaced by fancy buildings and crowded highways. It is the first encounter between a Swedish and an Indonesian choreographer where the only shared language is dance. The movements are an immediate response to space, bursting of ideas, outpouring of dreams, while following currents of biopolitics and ancestral life through a visual journey.
Dr Ami Skånberg (SE)
Ami Skånberg, born in Gothenburg, is a performer, choreographer and filmmaker. She has a PhD in Dance from University of Roehampton, and is the current Head of the Master’s programme M.A.D.E. at the Stockholm University of the Arts. She also works at University of Gothenburg. Skånberg often creates stage work (solo, and collaborative) based on embodied life stories in a particular theme. Her screendance films have been shown and awarded internationally since 1994. Her solo performance A particular act of survival received a performing arts award at Scenkonstgalan in Sweden in 2015. She walks slowly as a ceremonial, subversive act after extensive Nihon Buyo studies with Nishikawa Senrei in Kyoto since 2000. She is a board member of Nordic Forum for Dance Research. Her recent screendance pieces Ancestor and An Encounter with the Uncanny are currently shown in filmfestivals.
Dr Alfiyanto (ID)
Alfiyanto, born in West Sumatra is an artist and lecturer in Dance Creation/Choreography at ISBI Indonesian Arts and Culture Institute (Bandung)]. He is the initiator and curator for West Java Contemporary Danceand is the driving force behind the West Java
Contemporary Dance Festival and the Bandung Dance Film Festival. He studied at Indonesian Karawitan Arts Academy, Indonesian Arts Institute Padangpanjang and Indonesian Institute of Arts Surakarta majoring in dance. Alfiyanto joined the contemporary dance group Gumarang Sakti led by Gusmiati Suid in 1990-2004. Alfiyanto is also the founder and Art Director of WaJiWa Bandung Dance Theater and WaJiWa Creative House. Developing dance Activities and dreativity with eco-cultural concepts. He has a special interest in community dance. In his home village Ciganitri he runs a community dance center for Sundanese youth.
MUSIC:
Mats Skånberg
Bass player in Anticimex and now occasionally making electronic music. The tune Tried and Tired was originally self distributed in early 2023. Berg selected it for Current in December 2023.
VIDEO EDITOR DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY:
"Punk in Indonesia has often been described as a spectacular performance of disorder and resistance, a youthful style that posed a disruptive challenge to the authoritarian hierarchy and discipline of the New Order regime. The punk scene in Bandung has developed in the context of what is often referred to as ‘post-authoritarian’ Indonesia. Punk gives another historical narrative of the development of urban communities, and, while remaining a minority, is highly visible among urban Indonesian youth lifestyles." FRANS ARI PRASETYO
CLICK ON IMG TO PLAY VIDEO
Above: End sequence of Current.
To the right conversation post screening Wicklow Screen Dance Laboratory
CURRENT IN FESTIVALS:
DANCE CAMERA ISTANBUL 2024, TURKEY, Moved to June 2025
SCREENDANCE FESITVAL, SWEDEN, April 23-30, 2024
FESTIVAL VIDEODANZA, PUERTO RICO April 22-28, 2024
- Curator: ANA SÁNCHEZ-COLBERG
WICKLOW SCREENDANCE LABORATORY, Ireland, March 23-26, 2024
CURRENT SCREENED AT:
SLAKTHUSATELJÉERNA, Stockholm, Sweden, 13 September, 2024
WAP VIDEO SERIES ON WALKING, BKN, Björkö, Sweden, May 17, 2024
SUPERMARKET ART FAIR, STOCKHOLM April 25-28, 2024
MOMA KAMCHATKA, Russia, Kamchatka krai, Yelizovsky district, Paratunka village, Russia, April 21
ALMATY UNDERGROUND SCREENING SERIES, KAZAKHSTAN, Jan 24, 2024
- Curated by: DIANA GALIMZYANOVA
AFLOAT
Title: Afloat
Trt: TBA
Genre: video essay, documentary, screen dance, visual anthropology
Media: 16:9, 4K 3840x2160, color, sound
Format: To be available in requested format for screening and festivals
Language:
Produced: 2024
On location: July 2024, Japan
Expected release: spring 2025
Concept, Directors Producers: Berg Duo
Music: TBA
Dance/Choreography: Ami Skånberg (SE)
Camera/Editing: Anna Viola Hallberg
Concept & Producers: BERG
Keywords: video essay, screen dance, eco-politics, ecoperformance, ancestors, animism
AFLOAT is the second segment of the three channel/episode work BUOYANCY.
The focus is existential sustainabillity, animism, body, space, movement with interest for agency and community forming. It interweaves walking practice, screendance, faith ceremonies and individual voices in contemporary society in Japan.
It unfolds the passage from this world to another (humans and more than humans) i.e. Kami and more so about the ancestral aspect. It interweaves stories of past, present, and future centered around situational and physical contexts and relations by visualizing possible futures of coexistence via the artwork drawing from screen dance and documentary installations.
THE THREE SEAS
Last part of the trilogy Bouyancy is on interdependence
Title: The Three Seas
Trt: TBA
Location: Istanbul (Spring 2025)
Concept, Directors Producers: Berg Duo
Camera, Editing: Anna Viola Hallberg
Choreography/Dance artist: Ami Skånberg
Guest appearance:
Canan Yücel Pekiçten, dance artist, choreographer and academic at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University State Conservatory Contemporary Dance Department in Istanbul.
Others TBA
PUBLIC PARTICIPATORY WORKS, 2024
Title: Sculpture You >>>
Date: September 1-9, UK
Site:Stephens House and Gardens in The Sky is Moving Sideways. Curated by Rebekah Dean
Title: Suriashi for Rome
Date: 4 August at 8-8.40am
Site: Ponte Fabricio (Tiber Island Bridge), the oldest bridge in Rome, built in 62 BC. by Lucius Fabricius
Invited co-walker:
Context: World Congress of Philosophy >>>
Title: Centennial Walk >>>
Date: August, 2024
Site: Tiber Island Bridges, Rome + Stephens Garden London +
Invited co-walker: Rebekah Dean, John Shuerman, Eli, Mark
Context: World Congress of Philosophy
Title: Sculpture You (walking score)
Context: Open air exhibition /sculpture trail "The Sky is Moving Sideways"
Date: Sept 1-9
Venue: Stephens House & Gardens, London (uk)
Curator: Rebekah Dean
Title: Suriashi for Tokyo
Date: July 2, 2024
Site: Tokyo University, Komaba campus, Japan
Invited co-walker: CY CHEUNG
Title: Suriashi for Kyoto
Date: July 9th, Japan
Site: Taihei-kaku, Shin-en Gardens, Heian Jingu, Kyoto, Japan
Solowalk by Ami Skånberg in public space.
Title: Suriashi for Ise
Date: July 20st, Japan
Site: Hiyoke-bashi, Ise Jingu Geku, Outer Sanctuary, Japan
GOING ON BEYOND special edit of material accumulated for AFLOAT and presented with in Black-Market Truths: Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness at The World Congress of Philosophy Rome (it) August 7th 2024.
Berg Duo presented three acts on UNMADNESS: Hiromi, Going on Beyond and Yamamba
PERFORMANCE PHILOSOPHY WORKING GROUP
WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPY
Berg Duo is part of the working group bringing forward a presentation called Black-Market. Truths: Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness, at World Conngress of Philosophy in Rome Aug 1-8 2024 >>>
BERG DUOS presentaion UNMADNESS >>>
Black-Market Truths:
Performative Wisdom in Passion, Grief and Madness
ABSTRACT (LOUNGE)
Performance philosophy may be thought of as a travelling companion to phenomenology, process philosophy, the New Materialism(s) and aesthetics. It concerns itself with the actions of specific bodies in specific ecologies of affects, and not an abstract or idealised model of 'the body'. In the short decades since the emergence of Performance Philosophy few definitions of the field have been proposed. Its borders are unstable, its laws and customs remain unsettled. This may provoke criticism and questions of performance philosophy’s legitimacy. It may also be seen as an index of healthy growth and adaptation. Because performance philosophy is still something of a ‘wild frontier’ it is a zone where fundamental questions can be re-posed concerning the nature of wisdom and love, life and knowledge, legitimacy and truth.
If we begin with the hypothesis that love and wisdom are not co-extensive with verbal communication, then philosophy may be legitimately pursued by performative means. These non-standard modes of philosophising may be partly amenable to verbal expression but there is no a priori reason to suppose they are fully commensurable with speech, let alone amenable to general definition. Definitions sit best with things having no specific location and little prospect of change: this is good and useful in the case of geometric and atomic structures. But offer a definition of justice or philosophy or friendship and you will soon make enemies. With this in mind we invite colleagues to enact and unfold a set of trajectories rather than to describe or 'define' their work in words alone. We especially welcome poetic, musical, kinetic and gestural arts but contributions may take any form which responds to the words 'Passion and Grief'' in a span of less than fifteen minutes.
We chose passion and grief because they are disruptive currencies. They are traded at all levels from the sub-egoic through the personal to the tribal, national, and fully international levels. They feature as both effects and as motors in family dynamics, in cycles of revenge, in the largest geopolitical struggles. Passion and grief not only seem un-necessary for biological life, they frequently threaten it. Yet vanishingly few people are convinced enough by philosophical arguments for a ‘quiet soul’ to perform the exercises to support one. A life devoid of passion or grief would seem impoverished. Whether one views these turbulent affects as the bad news we don’t want to live without or as the engines of higher culture, they inhabit philosophy as an ineradicable black-market haunts all states and empires. We aim to consider this under-zone on its own terms as a resource for non-sanity, which may be as different from insanity as much as reason.
This round-table session aims to bind theory with demonstrations of transferable techniques for cross-disciplinary research. Dialogue has its place here of course, but beyond words there are performances via which the non-human world (traditionally the 'objects of knowledge) might find articulation on their own terms. We invite participants to explore spaces between human and non-human agents, opening up a variety of possible and impossible re-configurings” (Hinton 2013:182); ''bursting open, and scattering […] to effect a complete reorganization of meaning” (Barad 2017:41).
Keywords: cross-disiplinary research, performance philosophy, performative praxis/means, transferable teqniques, wild frontiers
PUBLIC PARTICIPATORY WORKS, 2023
Title: Suriashi for Björkö
Date: Sept 5th, 2023, Sweden
Participants: artists from WAP23
Video from part 1, Wooden Pathway/bridge
Img above is from part 2. Road side.
A community walk was made on December 3rd, 2023 as an inaguration of a site for a qr based art walk o Björkö, BKN ART WALK.
Title: Suriashi for Norrtälje
Date:June 30, 2023, Sweden
accessible for rewalks until Aug 14 for the duration of Trickle open air exhibition.
Participants:general public (about 100 participants)
Site: Faktoribron (bridge in central Norrtälje). Official innaguration of Trickle Art In the River Norrtäje >>>
Title: Suriashi for Bonn
Date: August 11
Participants: Public Participation
Site: Clemens-August-weg, Bonn Germany
Part of exhibition Becoming Landscape at DAS ESSZIMMER – Raum für Kunst+ >>>
Exposition for Embodying Hashigakari - Immanent Encounters With Bridges >>>
Exposition for The Centennial Walk >>>
PROJECTS MADE DURING STAY IN ROME AT CIRCOLO SCANDINAVIO IN CONJUNCTION WITH WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY
The suriashi project over briges has been turned in to a growing video installation link to exposition for Embodying Hashigkari - immanent Encounters with Briges >>>
Sculpture You >>>