New Voices in the Nordics: Rhoda Ting & Mikkel Bojesen

When I see your recent projects such as 'Amphibiome' (2024) that are related to the genre of public art, I think about situated knowledge and how the public accesses this knowledge through your work. Can you talk about that?

Our practice is based in our own curiosity and often takes a vantage point in research, or connection to knowledge - visible or hidden. It is an exploration that starts in what we don't know. We like to learn, and therefore we initiate our projects by asking questions that linger through to the final work, and are perhaps not answered directly, but offer new relationships, meanings and questions – not only for us, but hopefully for the audience as well. We are happy for our works to have a different impact on different people.

It is important for us that our works speak on many levels at the same time. One of the strengths of art is that it is multidirectional and can hold opposite truths and relate to both reason and the senses. It is a good lookout point to allow for flow of matter and meaning, without a particular outcome. With 'Amphibiome,' we wanted to bring audiences closer to their own natural environment, but also bring industry unbiasedly into their narrative. It is a celebration of the local phenomenon called the amphidromic point (circular tides), put into larger perspectives crossing geopolitcal borders and history of industry - and as such situating local knowledge into a larger global 'knowing.'

In relation to the notion of access to knowledge - there is a thread of transparency running through your work. How do ideas of knowledge sharing inform your practice?

Our practice is a collaboration between two artists, and a co-creation between fields of knowledge, other species, physical intra-actions and chemical reactions - a platform for understanding new ways of being, acting and caring in the future. Our works rarely center ourselves as individuals, but becomes a frame in which the seemingly hidden becomes visible.

We see our jobs as artists is to facilitate processes, and let situations unfold in their own chaotic way. There is no mystery, it is what it is. Nature is a much better painter than we could ever hope to be. We invite audiences into the profoundness of what is already there. There is no higher knowledge for us to communicate, we are zooming in on areas of science and philosophy and through our works share our excitement, and the opportunity to add to a larger conversation.

Regarding ideas of situated knowledge and the public - is there also a differentiation to be made between a specific public, such as the people and other-than-human inhabitants in Jøssingfjord who are present for 'Amphibiome,' and then the Public with a capital "P"?

We often work with the active sense of the word for knowledge: knowing. There is an important distinction between the sciences’ gathering of passive knowledge to that of the inherent active "knowing" that all beings, elements and members of the greater public somehow already express in their intra-action with each other and their environment.

To us "knowing" is a term to reframe particular conditions in which knowledge is produced, stored and communicated into an active listening to the many voices of public spheres, allowing for a cross-species democratization of what constitutes intelligence and allow for more than one perspective to exist.

In 'Amphibiome,' we experience a significance to the local people, nature and culture, as the sculptures are a site-specific translation of the immediate surrounding - with its history of geology, biology and mining. With a heightened sense of connection between localities and their relationships on a global scale, we as artists also consider the digital life of the artwork, knowing that what is anchored locally, might serve as inspiration for others elsewhere.

The knowing of one locality might serve as an entrance point to knowing another. As Australian-Danish artists we are deeply honoured to be trusted with telling the story of a Norwegian place and history, sharing that with the world, contributing with our partial perspectives.

Is there in your work, a movement of teaching or communication from a specific audience towards a broader one?

We started our art practice because of our own apparent lack of imagination. Brought up in nostalgic futuristic narratives and 'Bladerunner'-type analogies for future scenarios of the planet, we were to our own dissatisfaction, only able to imagine two different notions of the future: Either the planet crumbles under our weight, or our species ceases to exist by our own hand.

We started searching for other options, and became aware that the future we see as a society is largely made up of how we apply our imagination in the present - as an open-ended, very real place. We try to work in a way that oscillates between the specific and the broad, in a way that informs both, and allows for a widened sense of subjectivity and possibility in future potential societies. It’s difficult, and sometimes we have to correct ourselves.

Seen from an eco-critical perspective your work often handles a decentralised idea of “nature” vs. “culture” separating their respective milieus and idea of the world as being either inhabited or created. You talk about "the rhizome". Do you also see your art as pointing to or even creating a decentralissed and more nuanced sense of real world building across these spheres?

We believe that our future is best understood as intersectional. Crises weave together and reveal multiple systems of oppression that the western world is benefitting from. Our goal became to decenter ourselves and untangle the logics of European binary and hierarchical thinking that we’re part of. We're still working on it and humbled about how deeply seeded that is.

We started to work from a posthumanist perspective, a philosophical discipline that criticises the humanities for centering the human. A "queer ecological" perspective came about and we started to work with "a new notion of nature" learning that other species have vastly different ways of expressing themselves: mushrooms have thousands of genders and tunicates kill their brain once they’ve settled. We try through our works to challenge what is considered natural and normal.

The rhizome has become an important image for us in challenging the systems that govern our understanding of nature. It is a knotted and decentralised root system from the world of plants, but its archetypal form is expressed in many levels of existence: mycelium, brain cells, the cosmic web, the internet. To us it represents a new way of thinking about the structures and entangled connections of nature that we scientifically are only beginning to understand now, but intuitively have known forever.

Our works are attempts at this new world building, where everything moves in a mesh of unpredictable directions. Things don’t evolve from less complex to more complex, but adapt in non-direction, and all species are different hybrids of each other - created in cross contamination and relations.

Is there also a strain across this worldbuilding and knowledge sharing, that is as reliant on sensing, as on intellectual information?

We try to work across the aesthetic and the intellectual at the same time. To us aesthetics is not just about pleasure, we believe aesthetics to be a mode of being with its own epistemology - a pre-rational way of acting in the world through the senses, leaning into, sensing and trusting, the inherent ‘knowing’ our surrounding world. When the audience experiences our works we hope that they feel invited into an imaginative and sensuous space.

This seems to be the case in a work like 'Network' that you made with Rune Bosse at Roskilde Festival in 2017 but also in works like 'Vita - Necro - Vita,' from 2019-2022, in which there is a proposal of new ways of thinking about cyclic life.

Our practice spans over many ideas, as we seek to research "new notions of nature." Some of them are surrounding ideas of "living" sculptures, learning how to care for species that are outside of our normal scale of agency. We and other westworlders rarely come into contact with huge scobies (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast), as in the case with 'Vita-Necro-Vita,' or the intricate network of wheatgrass in 'Network.'

It creates an immediate connection point between two beings that can be explored bodily and openly, only later to be an object for the intellect. However we try not to reestablish a notion of purity in our work with Nature. Nature is not only biological, balanced, caring, abled and mothering - it is also synthetic, chaotic, vicious, disabled and queer.

We try to incorporate less nature-romantic ideas into our works - working with refined industrial materials, robotics and artificial intelligence. Hopefully our work expresses this composting of natures, and exists with multidirectional intention, like the rhizome.

I detect an inherent "optimism" in your practice. 'Amphibiome' shows co-creation between nature and yourselves, and in 'Vita - Necro - Vita' another idea of life opens to a view with less dread, really. How do you think about optimism in the harsh reality of the realm you work within - that of eco death and human destruction?

Quite often we refer to our practice as "affirmative speculative" which stands in stark contrast to the western method of science; the "critical deductive" method. Where the sciences for good reason have an inbuilt logic of fact vs. fiction, we as the public are able to walk in an imaginative and rhizomatic field that allows for spectrums of meanings to form. From this perspective, destruction might carry the seed to growth, and death might be mirrored in life. It is a perspective that is generative and as such optimistic, but not just hopeful for the sake of prayer.

This does not mean that we accept the conditions which late stage capitalism is inflicting on our world, however, we need to imagine new futures in order to create them.

There is a patience present in your projects, you seem to want to have people experience WITH the work – what would you like them to experience, discover or acknowledge, in meeting it?

We hope that our audience leans into the artwork in the same way we lean into the process of making it. There is no set way of understanding a hidden context, no composition to decipher - nothing represents something else - it is what it is. We aim towards works that you can walk up to unassuming and get a relationary experience that in itself prompts wonder and curiosity, to learn from the process, science or intention behind it.

You can feel the research in your work but there is often also a “doing”, an action that takes place. What does it mean to you this "show it don’t tell it”, way of working? Is this a way of being affirmative, through action?

As our practice is based on exploration, our intention is ultimately to make stories from beyond our scale and gaze, visible through tangible processes. We’re trying to show glimpses of worlds that we ourselves do not understand. There is not much "telling" to do, but a lot to learn, ask and "do". In exercising our agency, putting action to words we take part in a generative, shared field of knowledge production, that is shared and affirmative.