MERETE RØSTAD
DANCING FOREST (2ND EDITION)
19.11.2022-05.02.2023
PARABOL
Can a forest be a participatory monument? Dancing Forest is a sonic experience. It is composed of a sound piece that serves as a score. How do we embody the Forest, and the Forest embody us?
Let me take you to the forest with an exercise to open our senses through the act of radical listening. This exercise will let us explore listening by activating our very own embodied sound archive. Embodied sound archives are the summary of all our encounters with sound throughout our lifetimes. Let us imagine that our embodied sound archives (are the soundtracks of our lives) and that they create a narrative of all our experiences. Listening is a method in artistic practice and research in the public sphere that has the potential to be a shared experience as well as an individual one.
How does the forest´s conditioned environment shape our imaginary experiences of the forest as a site of remembrance? In Dancing Forest and other stories, Røstad asks the listener to recall their own embodied experiences of forests. The sound piece will engage with the Forest as a living monument of the future's past and present.
Dancing Forest was originally produced for a commission by Public Art Agency Sweden as part of Malin Arnell and Åsa Elzéns, Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge.
Edited by Alexandre Decoupigny.
Merete Røstad is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator whose projects are rooted in examining public life, remembrance and archives. Frequently engaging with communities and the public sphere, her process-based practice explores our everyday interactions with the histories inscribed in our surroundings and how we come to read the traces to be found there. In addition, each project examines a site's social and political significance as a starting point for thinking about collective memory to activate alternative modes of memorialization and remembrance in the public sphere. Her projects investigate the potential of how spatial and temporal constructions can serve as catalysts for a more profound commitment to history, identity, and memory.
Røstad completed her doctorate in Artistic Research with her investigation, The Participatory Monument – Remembrance and Forgetting as Art Practice in Public Sphere (2019). She holds an MFA in Art and Public spaces from Bauhaus Universität Weimar and a BFA in Fine Arts from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Røstad lives and works in Berlin and Oslo and is currently an Associate Professor for the master’s program Art and Public Space and Head of Research at the Faculty of Art and Craft at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. In addition, Røstad leads two international interdisciplinary artistic research projects: MEMORYWORK and ARcTic South.
PARABOL is a collaboration with Kunsthall 3.14 , where Lydgalleriet selects a sound work for the parabolic loudspeaker sited in Kunsthall 3.14's entrance hall. PARABOL has a particular focus on sonic commissions and edits, and offers a mode of address corresponding with the exhibitions in the main upstairs spaces. Dancing Forest (2nd Edition) by Merete Røstad is curated by Julie Lillelien Porter in relation to the exhibitions Great Patriotic by Zink Zine, Sergei Prokofiev and Evgeny Granilshchikov, Parallel Dimensions by Zhanna Gladko and I Will by Siri Hermansen.