Interview: Field Work

We talked with Danish artists, Field Work, about their collaboration and what projects they are working on right now. Field Work is Lise Skou and Nis Rømer. In addition to Field Work, Lise has worked with rum46, an artist run space in Aarhus, Denmark and Nis works with the independent curatorial project, Publik.

 Field Work started organically through other collaborative projects that Lise and Nis were involved with, specifically Swop Projects. After Swop Projects ended in 2007, the two began working together, sharing a mutual interest in understanding “how people live and organize themselves in relation to [their] environment and surroundings.”

As Field Work, they make between 2 and 4 projects per year. We asked them about a recent project, Hallucinogenic Parks, which was made for the exhibition, Gentle Actions – art, ecology, and action, (Norway, 2010.) Gentle Actions brought together artists, scientists, and researchers in the humanities, among others to give walks, make projects, and participate in workshops on topics like transition towns and ecology in art.

For Hallucinogenic Parks, Lise and Nis asked two questions, “What would happen if pockets of counterculture [inhabited] our buildings or became part of our cities, parks, and planning?” and “What if irrationality was given a greater space in modern architecture, city planning, and the everyday life?” Taking these questions and the work of the German, anarchist landscape architect Lebrecht Migge, as their starting point, Field Work made architectural models of possible city gardens made with hallucinogenic plants.  They researched the types of plants that would be ideal in a Nordic climate, preferring plants that could be found in their back yards. Living up to their name they also took samples of plants from field research, drying them and adopting a scientific aesthetic in their cataloging methods. This version of Hallucinogenic Parks focused on plants that grow in Nordic climates, but Field Work is interested in making the project location specific, by finding plants that grow wherever the project might be exhibited.

Activist practices play a part in the thinking behind the group’s overall art practice.  Lise says, “I am occupied by politics and questions of human conditions in relation to world development. Therefore, I cannot separate my activist practice and my art practice.” As a group, their projects tend to focus on issues of environmental sustainability and alternatives to the current economic system of global capitalism. The name Field Work refers to their interest in working with people, conducting field research, but also in considering a progressive relationship to colonialist connotations that a name like Field Work suggests.

In a colonialist context, a field researcher often has a skewed power relationship with the people and places where he or she is conducting research. Lise and Nis want to avoid that unequal power relationships with the people and places where they engage in projects.

“Edible Plants” from Workarounds.

Currently, Field Work is working on a radio play and performative event that deals with ideas of community based economies, using the intentional communities of Charles Fourier as a starting point. With this project, they want to spur people into action for re-thinking how we can exist in the world.

Additionally, they are working on a project for spring 2012 at the Freies Musuem in Berlin for the exhibition, Extreme Crafts. The project they are developing ties their interests in urban ecologies and alternative economic models together with a little bit of “field work.”

Here is what they say about the project, “We want to use craft to [involve] broader societal issues. We want to analyze the living conditions in the neighborhood of the Freies Museum from an architectural and ecological perspective as well as from the organizational modes found in everyday life and daily consumer transactions. With talks, walks and detours into the neighborhood we want to allow the audience to do-it-themselves. We will collaborate with Allmende Kontor, a community garden and networking platform for the newly established community gardens movement in Berlin, on the premises of Tempelhof, Berlin’s former City Airport.”

To conclude, Field Work says, “We will produce with a lust for life and dance on the graves of the bloodsuckers from the creative class and the experience economy.” Follow their projects here.

 Note: All images used courtesy of Field Work.