Booklet: Sacrifice

ENGLISH Fe e re l fre tur e n m to e

6.6–27.9 2020

SACRIFICE Kalle Brolin Tanya Busse Carolina Caycedo Curator: Mariangela MĂŠndez Prencke

@rodastenkonsthall rodastenkonsthall.se

2

3

1

2ND FLOOR

2ND FLOOR 1. Jag är Bergtagen [I am Spirited Away] Kalle Brolin

4.1

2. Yuma, or the Land of Friends Carolina Caycedo

3. Patrón Mono [Blonde Boss]

4.2

4.3

Carolina Caycedo

3RD FLOOR

3RD FLOOR

4. The Poet’s Antidote Tanya Busse 4.1. T he Poet’s Antidote (video) 4.2. B lood, Sweat, and Tears (three photographs)

6

5

4.3. A rms I, Arms II, Arms III (three prototype sculptures) 4TH FLOOR 5. Foresight Filaments Carolina Caycedo

6. Esto No Es Agua [This Is Not Water] Carolina Caycedo

4TH FLOOR

INTRODUCTION

One would have thought that the instinct of self-preservation would have kicked in, and yet, we (modern humans of this planet) have just carried on watching our screens, worried perhaps, but yet just carrying on. Future generations might ask why if we knew, said and did nothing…

A sacrifice is commonly defined as an act of slaughtering a living being, an animal, a person, or even a river, as an offering to a deity. To sacrifice is to give up something one values, to surrender a muchappreciated possession, even one’s own life, as a gift to something considered larger and greater. A sacrifice is done in exchange of benefits, such us prosperity or the continuation of the species.

The global powers of the West have created a series of sacrifice zones that extend across the continents of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, reaching across many sites in Europa, including Scania and up to northernmost Scandinavia. These zones are geographic areas permanently damaged by environmental destruction or economic

disinvestment, marginalized places that bear the burdens of industrial capitalism. The well-being of both humans and ecosystems are compromised, through decisions taken by outside agents following abstract and illusory notions of “progress” or “development.”

Mines, agro-industries and hydropower structures are just a few examples of such projects known to create sacrifice zones, schemes that arrogate for themselves the right to subject all forms of living, human and nonhuman, to its own terms, or worse, to non-existence.

The exhibition Sacrifice presents practices concerned with environmental catastrophe, extractivism and the transformative work of social resistance that call attention to other ways of existing that thinkfeel with the Earth. Combining moving images, sculpture, photography and sound, Kalle Brolin, Tanya Busse and Carolina Caycedo have crafted unique axes of meaning and points of intersection linking politics, devastation, ecology, life cycle assessments and minerals (some

named after love goddesses) with the flows of life, from dating apps to spiritualities, mythologies and the struggles of noaidis, indigenous communities, peasants and nuns against the colonial-capital machine.

In her work, Carolina Caycedo addresses the effects of large dams on landscapes and societies in American bio-regions, tracing the transition of rivers, public bodies of water, into privatized resources. Her “Water Portraits”, as she herself refers to much of her work, are an invitation to revise modern understandings of nature which separates humans from the surrounding ecosystems. In Kalle Brolin’s collection of images and quotes, the ecological impacts of mining the mineral vanadin in Scania—used in batteries allegedly needed for a transition to a fossil free future—is complexly related to the social impact of smartphones and the possibilities that dating apps represent in terms of love and fertility. In Tanya Busse’s work, a “black substance” sourced in the city of Kirkenes in northern Norway, is the protagonist. The substance is iron ore, a mineral whose extraction drastically transforms natural environments through open pit mining, but being the main metal in producing steel is needed for infrastructure, ships, automobiles, machines, and

weapons. However, despite the toughness of steel, combinations of sacred plants that grow in the vicinity of the mine might be enough to “shake the modern day war god to its knees.”

The works presented in Scarifice offer knowledges produced from the relation to the earth, not the separation. They bring forth the practices of those struggling in its defense, in the negotiation of material and spiritual realities in our only planet. Their sets of propositions encourage existential resistance against the dominant forms of capitalist modernity. As the sociologist Arturo Escobar points at, “we are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions”.

The knowledges produced from territorial struggles happening in various places around the world, provide us with new elements for thinking about the profound cultural and ecological transitions needed to enter into a sustainable future. These works

by Kalle Brolin, Tanya Busee and Carolina Caycedo, remind those of us existing in the densest urban and liberal worlds that we, too, dwell in a world that is alive. They invite us to reimagine ourselves as belonging to the stream of life, attuned with the needs of the Earth.

THE ARTISTS

Kalle Brolin is an artist and a writer, working with video installation and performance.

His latest series of works, on the landscape and culture of the coal mines and sugar factories in southern Sweden, has been exhibited at Malmö Art Museum and Moderna Museet in Stockholm. These works are also shown in an extensive tour of exhibitions and screenings throughout these mining- and sugar towns of Scania. He is based in Scania. Kalle Brolin graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from Umeå Art Academy in 2004.

Tanya Busse works across mediums of moving-images, installations and photography.

Her practice boasts the synthesis of nature often combined with an industrial, post-human presence.

She is interested in deep-time, invisible architecture and how power is produced and articulated through material relationships and histories of place. Originally from Moncton, NB, Canada, she is currently based in Norway. She studied at NSCAD University in Halifax and Kunstschule Berlin

Weissensee in Germany and holds a master’s degree from the Academy of Art in Tromsø.

Carolina Caycedo participates in movements of territorial resistance, solidarity economies, and housing as a human right.

Carolina’s artistic practice has a collective dimension to it in which performances, drawings, photographs and videos are not just an end result, but rather part of the artist’s process of research and activism. Caycedo is a London-born Colombian artist, living in Los Angeles. She studied at Los Andes University, Bogotá (BFA) and Roski School of Fine Arts University of Southern California (MFA).

WORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

KALLE BROLIN Jag är Bergtagen [I am Spirited Away] 2020 Two-channel video installation The video installation Jag är bergtagen [I am Spirited Away] deals with fossil free economies, life cycle analyses, and the tangled mythologies of love, fertility, and dating apps. Staged in Scania, a region whose past is connected to coal mining in the 1800s, and presently is threatened by prospects of excavating the mineral vanadium (vanadin), the installation unfolds in different scenes interweaving questions of extraction, human relations and labour.

One scene submits documentation regarding the 19th century coal mining company use of child labor, with the added intention of breeding a stock of workers suitable for underground work.

Another revolves around love, relationships, and the exploitation of the mine laborers, linking also to the contemporary use

of dating apps by young people in the former mining towns. It features researchers and students in attempting life cycle assessments of both mobile phones and the mentioned dating apps, unveiling details such as raw materials in use, energy consumption, and waste. A third scene maps the presence of these materials in present-day Scania, exploring the nested conflicts connected to mining operations today, like the nuns of a local convent engaged in trying to stop new attempts by extraction industries.

With each such scene composed of an assortment of interviews, choir songs, collected stories and images, all in a flow of data seemingly without beginning or end, Jag är bergtagen is presented on what resembles the screens of two giant smartphones. All narration takes also the form of texts tapped directly onto the screen; portrait images are swiped left or right when deleted as if on a dating app; and similarly, other images are scrolled or zoomed by hand, in a dynamics of viewing inspired by our interminable screen life with

our phones and tablets.

The entire installation departs from a 1883 photograph depicting children from the coal-mining village Skromberga performing Den bergtagna (the one being spirited away), a fairy tale play where a young maiden is forced into marriage with the lord of the mountain (Bergakungen). The play shares its name with a short story of lethal love written by Victoria Benedictsson, an author from Hörby, the town where the mining of vanadium is being prospected today.

As such, many elements of this work are symbolically charged.

Vanadium, the prospected mineral, allegedly to be used in batteries needed for a transition to a fossil free future, is named after the goddess Vanadis (also called Freja), the Nordic goddess of beauty and fertility, and by extension love. Nuns are said to be the brides of God, albeit sworn to not reproduce, yet their protests can be seen as ways of protecting nature, while the goddess of fertility and love is forced into marriage with an underground god of mining and death. In Kalle Brolin´s words, “It is a dialogue about the colonization of love and relationships as perpetrated by the mining industries in Southern Sweden, navigating the varied

historical, technological and mythical dimensions as if they were a landscape”.

TANYA BUSSE The Poet’s Antidote 2020 Installation with video, photography, plaster molds, wall text and juniper The Poet’s Antidote (video) 2019 HD video, 12 min 33 sec Blood, Sweat, and Tears (three photographs) 2020 Electron microscope scan transferred to baryta paper, aluminum, birch wood frame 1 M x 1.5 M Total edition: 2 / 3 Arms I, Arms II, Arms III (three prototype sculptures) 2020 Plaster mold of rocket launcher Plaster mold of grenade Plaster mold of mortar Wall text and juniper In The Poet’s Antidote, Tanya Busse probes visual images, textures and sounds looking to capture the structure and the nature of the war machine, aiming to obtain ways of deflecting its

destructive powers. Video footage of post-WWII architecture of the military-industrial complex embedded deeply into the arctic landscape, combines with casted weapon prototypes in pale skin color, macroscopic visions of blood, sweat and tears, an array of juniper branches for protection, and fragments of a conversation with a noaidi (a Sámi shaman).

Behind these elements lays also the aspect that the country of Norway—where the artist lives and has given birth to a child—is one of the world’s largest arms exporters.

A segment of the installation focuses on a black substance that appears in various forms, from solid states to liquid. The substance symbolizes a “dark disease” that plagues humans in their insatiable desire for war, power, and capital.

While a metaphor for an ailment, the black substance is also inscribed as iron ore, the main ingredient in the making of steel— used for building infrastructure, tools, ships, automobiles, machines, and weapons.

This part was primarily filmed in Kirkenes, in northern Norway near the Russian border, a town with soils rich in iron ore and thus historically tied to the mining industry, in particular to open pit mining which drastically

transforms the landscape. Just as the entire city of Kiruna in Sweden is being moved 3 kilometers to the east due to the extraction of this metal. Carved at the core of the territory, the mine has become a hollow heart supposedly boosting the economy or the region’s affluence.

A central element is the ongoing conversation with a noaidi, at work with crafting a spell capable of destroying the war machine.

The noaidi will however not cast a spell only out of resistance, for “darkness cannot drive out darkness, war cannot be won with war.” Instead, she suggests the use of words as weapons and a combination of invisible powers such as assorted arctic plants to protect us and “shake the modern day war god down to its knees”.

While much is related to its particular local context, The Poet’s Antidote addresses universal microforms of resistance, like the many indigenous communities, peasants and dwellers of the North, South, East or West struggling to protect their territories from human interventions, military structures and extraction. As the noaidi says in her conversation with the artist: “We´re at a time in history when people no longer believe in the old gods. They have been replaced by the gods

of capitalism—internet, media, extractivism, fossil fuel society, the arms industry, etc.” Refusing to just cast a spell upon the new gods, the noaidi suggests that we are mistaken, confusing the concepts of war and catastrophe. Given our tragic history of seemingly endless wars, destroying the course of life, we are unable to see clearly the new stories facing us. Has the myriad of depictions of the apocalypse lures us into thinking that we are prepared for the future? But we are not, and the noaidi’s concern is how to protect life and the planet, now and tomorrow.

CAROLINA CAYCEDO Yuma, or the Land of Friends 2014 Digital prints on acrylic glass, satellite images Dimensions: 580×473 cm Patrón Mono [Blonde Boss] 2018 From the Water Portrait Series 3 channels, HD Video 4 min 32 sec, color Esto No Es Agua [This Is Not Water] 2015 From the Water Portrait Series One channel HD Video

Sound by Daniel Pineda 5 min 20 sec Foresight Filaments 2018 Digitally printed textile Since 2012, Carolina Caycedo has examined the effects of hydropower developments on landscapes and communities in several American bio-regions.

A starting point was a visit to El Quimbo—one of Colombia’s largest dam infrastructure projects in recent years—where Caycedo spent time with local communities of fishers. Learning of the impact on their living conditions and on ecosystems, she gained a better understanding of the layered political, social, economic, and environmental consequences that these development projects entail.

Ranging from performances to films shot on location, Caycedo’s work grows out of working with various communities, engaged in the protection of their territory, and in researching the transformation of public bodies of water, such as rivers, into privatized commodities.

Calling attention to disastrous effects of purportedly benevolent hydropower projects, Caycedo portrays rivers as living entities with political agency and rights.

She works at unlearning the

term ‘landscape’—including its use in the arts—to revise our understanding of nature as a passive entity separated from humans, suitable to exploit or contemplate. In the indigenous cosmogonies given voice in Caycedo’s works, all bodies of waters are connected. Rivers are the veins of the planet, and their waters embrace communities and ecosystems of which humans are also part of.

Part of a series of videos referred to as “Water Portraits”, This Is Not Water blends crafted sound and imagery, directed at rendering bodies of water as social agents, also within contemporary environmental conflicts. Here the river flows in multiple directions, bifurcating into new rivers, as if seen through a kaleidoscope.

Cascades run horizontally, diagonally or even climb up. The indigenous cosmovision contains no above or below, nor superiority or inferiority in nature, all is circular and sustainable, since the river is also cloud and rain and trees and catfish and other beings. Foresight filaments is a tactile sculpture conceived to evoke the sensory presence of the river. An object of itself, while simultaneously part of and at the service of something else, it is a soft, flexible, accommodating, and porous sculpture that does not

interrupt the flow. As sociologist Arturo Escobar reminds us: “Living beings of all kinds constitute each other’s conditions for existence. They interweave to form an immense and continually evolving tapestry.”

Also the video installation Patrón Mono [Blonde Boss] invites us to reimagine our relationship to water, resist viewing the river as a resource to be exploited, and understand it as a living being with an inexhaustible capacity for giving and sharing when cared for.

Patrón Mono portrays the lower Cauca river in Colombia, currently affected by the Hidroitungo hydroelectric dam. This river has been an ancestral provider of fish and gold to its communities which with artisanal means have been able to make a living. They call the river Patrón Mono for its yellow color, for the gold found in its sands, and because “it is the best employer in the world as it does not set schedules and never refuses to pay, always providing us with what we need”. While the triptych of projections in Patrón Mono incorporates imagery of the river canyon itself, including shots of the mentioned gold nuggets, it is also grounded in indigenous cosmovisions challenging Western relations with nature. In fact, this work is concerned with how to speak of the pluriverse, that the

world is made up of multiple worlds and ontologies, irreducible to a Eurocentric experience or terms.

Through satellite and aerial images, the photomural Yuma, or the Land of Friends displays various stages in the construction of the El Quinbo dam, whose construction required the redirection of the Magdalena River, the main fluvial artery in Colombia, affecting a vast area and displacing peasants and indigenous populations of the region.

Despite its size and intricacy, the mural can only imply or suggest the environmental devastation caused by this megastructure. Yet Yuma, or the Land of Friends furthers the comprehension of the destructive consequences of the desire to master nature, also with the complicity of state power, of the conversion of everything into resources, goods, profit, or, even, sacrificed to nonexistence.

Carolina Caycedo’s body of works conjures water as a commons, shared by all living, alerting awareness of the tight relationship between political and social conflicts and environmental injustice. “Art has always been for me a tool to exist in society and to exert citizenship,” she says, “environmental interest is never dislocated from social and political aspects.”

GUIDED TOURS

Short on art Tuesday–Sunday 1 pm Every day we offer short introductions to the exhibitions. Take the opportunity to get some information before you venture into the exhibitions on your own.

One hour on art Sundays 4 pm Join us for a guided visit to the exhibitions with one of our art educators! Make questions, speak up your mind, and talk with us on art and the exhibitions.

WITH SUPPORT FROM

Opening hours: Mon closed Tue–Sun 12–5 pm