Every art academy should cultivate a relationship to a field somewhere! It may seem strange at first, then it becomes – pun intended – natural: that besides the workshop for wood, metal, glass and so on, there would also be a workshop for working and thinking with land and the species that co-habit with us on it. The question of ecology is intertwined not only with humanity’s (and the humanities’) future, but has become a fundamental aspect of contemporary art. It was therefore with much excitement that the Royal Institute of Art (KKH) welcomed the artistic researchers constituting Kultivator and their project Tell it to the field that she wants to be a Meadow who joined us at the beginning of 2025 with funding from the Swedish Research Council. Finally, we could begin to cultivate our relationship to a field (that might want to be a meadow) for a period. As a beginning to our collaboration, we have invited Kultivator who works and thinks with a field on Öland to share their labour and thinking with us. The Higher Seminar will be an event introducing their work and the meeting of artistic research and the eco-systems that we are both custodians of, and dependent upon.
Warmly welcome,
Axel Andersson
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research, Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm
Tell it to the field that she wants to be a Meadow
The project Tell it to the field that she wants to be a Meadow wants to use artistic participatory process to explore ways of re-thinking and re-acting means of decision-making and control within an existing farm geography. The research is made by Kultivator, where small-scale agroforestry and animal husbandry, is combined with artistic practice since 2005, when the artists Mathieu Vrijman and Malin Lindmark Vrijman, as well as farmers Maria Lindmark and Henric Stigeborn started working together under this name. Since the beginning, Kultivator has been hosting artists, students, activists and farmers for longer and shorter periods and engaged in collaboration with our local eco-systems. One long-term collaboration partner who is external researcher in Tell it to the field… is the artist-researcher Karin Bolender, who is the principal researcher and founder of Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) in Oregon, US. R.A.W. is a platform for collaborative transdisciplinary ecological art practices that root in rural landscapes (all the faunal, floral, mineral, and chemical forms that comprise them) and specific acts of un/naming and imaginative, responsible, and respectful inhabiting.
Tell it to the field… explores the potential of, and the urgency for, another perspective on interspecies power relations, in connection with the inequalities and conflicts between species and lifestyles that come with the climate and mass-extinction crisis. Even if mankind has access to scientific knowledge about nearly every life form around us, historical and pre-historical evidence of societies in balance with their eco-systems, and even advanced post-human theorists, we still seem not to have the cultural, emotional or creative tools to change perspective in practice. The research project’s assumption is that we need to turn to the random, intuitive, poetic and aesthetic to make that progress. Tell it to the field… is attempting to look for those tools by using the artistic research of performative actions and language of asking and giving control to the eco-systems that feed us.
Kultivator
Kultivator is an independent art practice as well as an experimental project platform that initiates and executes projects, exhibitions and workshops investigating our relationship with the landscapes that feed us. It is founded and run by Mathieu Vrijman and Malin Lindmark Vrijman, both educated at Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, NL. Their works range from discursive cultivation projects and eco-building experiments to study groups for riding and horsemanship for refugee women or community River-writing sculptures. An important aspect of all activities is the exchange of experiences between people with different backgrounds, and the rest of the biosphere, building on participation and practical hands-on work. In their home location, a rural village on Öland, on the south-eastern coast of Sweden, Kultivator has an artist-in-residence space, work and studio, and a community vegetable garden incorporated in a forest pasture. Kultivator shares space with sheep, horses, donkeys, cats, dogs and chickens, working together in both art performances, timber logging and fibre production. Since the beginning of 2005, approximately one hundred and fifty artists, researchers and farmers have stayed and worked with the local eco-systems on Kultivator’s farm.
Dr. Karin Bolender
Dr. Karin Bolender has a Ph.D. in Environmental Humanities from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College, US. She is an artist-researcher and founder of the experimental ecological art platform Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) in the Coast Range foothill forests just west of a town called Philomath, Oregon. Engaging methods across contemporary art and environmental humanities, Dr. Bolender interweaves artistic, academic, activist, philosophical, and other fields of inquiry. Her works and writings have been featured internationally in numerous venues and publications. She has been teaching courses in art, literature, writing, and related subjects across the humanities since 2004.
About the higher seminar
The Royal Institute of Art arranges higher seminars to in a collaborative spirit share, and together with a wider public reflect over, research practices and processes that occur within our institution. The format of the seminar varies according to the practices and processes presented and discussed.