Meander/Boreal Forest residency
The two-month fully supported Meander/Boreal Forest residency by Northern Photographic Centre provides access to the Oulanka Research Station (FI). It is aimed at artists who want to create a new work at intersection of art, science and ecology.
The research station and its surroundings provide opportunities for research and art in a wide range of fields including climate, biodiversity, extreme conditions, stream ecology, coniferous zone research, land use change and transformation, biology, remote sensing and past, present and possible futures. The area provides opportunities for study of the various impacts of climate change on local populations, nature and the vitality of the area. Artist(s) will be able to research and work with long-term research data and real-time research environments, such as the EcoClimate sensor and testing fields in a hillside swamp and a pine forest.
The two-month residency took place partly in the city of Oulu and partly at the Oulanka Research Station in Kuusamo.
Arist duo Cesar&Lois was selected for this residency. Cesar&Lois collective project Towards a Boreal Intelligence contemplates the complexity of the boreal forest through the collective’s study of the signaling of different nodes within the forest. The signaling of species within the boreal forest feeds an AI that manifests the embedded intelligence of the far North ecosystem.
Co-exsting, multi-species intelligence, observations and tangible views to other than human species communication is on focus of Cesar&Lois’s work. The project contemplates the complexity of the boreal forest through study of the signaling of different nodes/species that live within the boreal forest feeds an AI that manifests the embedded intelligence of the far North ecosystem. Understanding multi-species intelligence requires a shift from human-centered, anthropomorphism, perspectives to post-human, more inclusive, ecological views towards post-human knowledge as researcher Rose Braidotti states. This critical approach calls as a way to challenge existing knowledge systems and especially knowledge intensive capitalism in order to include and recognize agency of others that is distributed across networks in its various forms from human, non-humans, technology to environment. Agency of others can also be seen through Deleuzes and Giuattaris idea of assemblage that propose an ontology, study of existence, and reality, where all elements, human and non-human, coexist on the same level. This fluid and dynamic system, Assemblage, relies on agency of its elements; other than human life and human life and technology that affects and interacts biosphere beyond human control challenges human centered relationships and idea of control and dominance with the environment and other species, fostering a more holistic understanding of the world and setting way to more complex views and imaginaries.