In October 2023 I will be one of a number of international artists selected for the “Walking As Practice” residency on Björkö, an island in the Northern Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden. The ‘Walking As Practice’ residency is curated by Anna Viola Hallberg & Ami Skånberg under the auspices of BKN, a not for profit organisation. Established in 2020, AiR BKN supports artists by offering studios and accommodation for the exploration of the rural costal region in Sweden as site for contemporary art and photography. Where the sea meets the forest.
https://bjorkokonstnod.se/wap23artists
My residency is for a week and will be an opportunity for me to reconnect with Swedish collaborator Ami Skånberg. We created Vargkaffe (Wolfcoffee) during a residency in Lapland in 2009 together with Japanese dance artist Heidi S. Durning. We initially connected in Melbourne in 2007 through our shared practice as filmmakers and dancers. Ami, trained in Japanese dance, walks suriashi as as a radical and critical art of inquiry. I am currently walking into writing, a practice that has grown out of a grief ritual and into the writing of a book about my embodied history.
While there I hope to weave a practice of walking and writing—inscribed in video images and physical encounters as well as in words. Working alone and with others I hope to develop a map for allowing and imagining. Letting encounters between surfaces sing, laying across language, resting in rhythms, capturing contemplation, punctuating points of view. How can our bodies merge with and nurture landscape as it nourishes us in return.
Photo: Vargkaffe (2009) by A. Bryngel