Aurike Quintelier

imwsts II: bird radio

mwsts II: bird radio is a whimsical in-situ installation, that searches for the age-old relationship between human and bird. Through the trade of birdseed and wool, bird-stories were live broadcastet worldwide from Sweden in April 2025 with online radio.

The installation itself is made of materials found on site, scuffed and sanded and bent and sewn (everything except glued) to create an ergonomic and acoustically interesting structure. Deep inside the metal body, inside the wool, a microphone was hidden that was programmed to record at dawn and again at dusk over the course of five days.

The project came to life during an artist residency with Björkö Konstnod (SE) in 2023, in the most northern archipelago of Stockholm, and was finalised and recorded during a second artist residency in 2025. It is deeply rooted in the theoretical work of Donna Haraway. The title imwsts or ‘it matters what stories tell stories’ is a reference to her philosophy of situated knowledge; it matters what thoughts we think thoughts with, it matters what stories tell stories, it matters what worlds make up other worlds. The broadcasting of live-recorded bird song plays with the claims of a recent scientific study that bird song ‘enhances human mental health’, indicating a lack of predators, and therefor activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Bird sounds supposedly reduce stress, lower blood pressure and alleviate anxiety. The claim and article in itself prove to the artist how far we have removed ourselves from our natural world.

To listen to the recordings of bird radio, feel free to follow this link: https://www.aurikequintelier.be/birdradio

location: Björkö Arholma

date: 2023-2025

curators: Anna Viola Hallberg and Ami Skånberg

residency: Björkö Konstnod – Walking As Practice program

research: researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454797

researchcatalogue.net/view/2454801/2454863

Aurike Quintelier is an architect and spatial practitioner based in Brussels, with work that varies from buildings, interiors, site-specific installations, drawings, collections to scaled models. She believes in the power of the relation between human and the places we are part of, in the symbiotic stories already present that care-fully can be unveiled and dug up. Her work aims to be a ripple with a deeper effect on the people living/experiencing it, and is vernacular when possible. She is fascinated by the impact of spaces on our lives and the mutual care that emerges on a small and large scale. Archiving, collecting and assemblage-ing forms the base of every site-specific question, both in the physical world and the theoretical world, creating work that is deeply rooted in its context.’

Maja Andersson

The thread between my fingers

Between my fingers runs the thread, it stitches my armor. A shield against the world, to hide, to shine, be seen, and change. To show my true self and be someone else for a moment.

Ongoing performance.

Maja Andersson is a visual artist, with the body as a central part of her practice. She has worked with performance art and is continuously exploring different mediums and forms of expression. She uses video, photography, fabrics, clay, sometimes in combination. The point of entry to her work is feelings as a state of mind, or a physical feeling in the body. By entering these feelings and sensations, she explores what is inside of us, and how we relate to it – willingly or unwillingly. 

https://www.anderssonmaja.com/

Ekaterina Sisfontes

Borders Unlimited

BORDERS UNLIMITED is a spontaneous performative intervention at Supermarket 2026, organized by Borderless Borders, a temporary collective initiated by Ekaterina Sisfontes. Visitors encounter an unexpected border checkpoint inside the exhibition, where improvised guards demand documents, ask absurd questions, and control access to an ever-shifting “state.” Each crossing reveals a new country with new laws, symbols, and power structures. Guards may change roles, recruit spectators, accept bribes, abandon their posts, or invent arbitrary rules. Passage is granted or denied without logic or equality, exposing the instability, theatricality, and fundamental meaninglessness of national borders and the systems that uphold them. 

BORDERS UNLIMITED

Performative intervention (uncoordinated happening) at Supermarket 2026.

The event is organized by Borderless Borders, a temporary collective of participants brought together by Ekaterina Sisfontes and BKN artist.

Idea: This is an ideal project for unserious artist-activists with a serious task to show how meaningless state borders and the states covered by them are.Form of action: A role‑playing experience involving the spontaneous participation of an unprepared audience. As visitors move through the exhibition space, they are unexpectedly confronted by a border checkpoint, where patrol officers request identification documents and require them to answer a brief questionnaire before being allowed to cross the physical barrier that marks the entrance to another, unknown to them country. “Throughout the performance, the identity of the border itself continually shifts: the patrol’s behavior, the country’s name, its flag, and even the questions asked at the checkpoint are repeatedly changed. As a result, visitors can never return to the same ‘country’ twice; each time they encounter the barrier, they are confronted with a new, unfamiliar state that demands to be navigated anew.

Ekaterina Sisfontes
https://www.sisfontes.com/
Soviet-born, multidisciplinary Swedish artist whose practice traverses jewelry design, conceptual art, and performance. She first established her eponymous brand, SisKa Design, before expanding into the broader artistic vocabulary. Working across diverse media and contexts, she has developed performance as both a central artistic strategy and an embodied mode of living.

Natasha Dahnberg

Encyclopedia of Lost Libraries
Objects, installation, performance

Encyclopaedia of Lost Libraries is an ongoing project examining how memory, knowledge, and cultural infrastructures are affected when libraries, archives, and museums are destroyed during war and political upheaval. The series consists of sculptural objects in oak and ash: solid, closed forms that resemble books but cannot be opened. They allude to the real volumes whose contents have been lost and function as memorials to knowledge erased, traditions broken, and the narratives that violence attempts to control. They may also evoke larger human losses, while the materiality and sealed form articulate both the fragility and the resilience of memory.

On the front of each object, clouds of smoke are drawn in silverpoint — a medieval and Renaissance technique whose oxidising lines deepen slowly over time. On the reverse, short texts describe the libraries referenced by the work. Together, the objects form an archive of silence — a reminder of how knowledge is manipulated or disappears when its material foundation is destroyed.

The books included in the project bear the title THE HEAVY BOOK on their spines, a phrase that operates both literally — the carved wooden objects weigh considerably more than paper books — and metaphorically, since the narratives they carry, of war and destruction, are equally heavy. Some volumes have silver inlays, developed in collaboration with silversmith Ekaterina Sisfontes. Both the materials and the craftsmanship mark the works as rare and precious, underscoring the intangible weight and significance of the book. 

In a participatory performative reading, memory takes shape through the voice. From scrolls unfold fragments of encyclopedic entries about libraries and archives that have been deliberately destroyed during wars and revolutions—places where knowledge, culture, and ideology were once gathered. The scroll itself is also an art object: made of veneer and covered with silverpoint drawings. The texts move between languages and voices as the audience is invited to continue reading in the languages they carry with them. The performance becomes a temporary archive where what someone once tried to erase is recalled through the collective act of reading.

www.dahnberg.comSoviet-born artist, born in Moscow in 1969, based in Sweden since 2000. Her practice spans visual art and curatorial work, including roles at Köttinspektionen in Uppsala and Uppsala Art Museum. Working across verbal and visual languages, she engages processes of cultural translation, employing symbols and materials to navigate the space between personal history and contemporary Swedish context. Recurring themes of loss and resilience inform a body of work that bridges displacement and belonging.

Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors Creator & Curator Susannah Mills

THE DOOR WAS RIGHT HERE, 2025

Performance by Jasmine Albequerque Croissant. Developed at the Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors Residency (LAWS) at BKN, this work was instigated by a personal video of the initial discovery of her destroyed family home from the Woolsey Fire of 2018. As a survivor of this kind of loss, Albuquerque Croissant experienced the earth swallowing everything she owned. She speaks of wanting to be swallowed as well, and a catharsis evolves from the symbolic action of this on stage. Combining themes of motherhood, birth, death, and rebirth, this work explores the power of nature to absorb and transmute loss.

Video and performance in collaboration with Rick Gradone, with Wren Petrichor Ossman and additional footage by Jane Szabo

Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors (LAWS)

Creator & Curator Susannah Mills

Susannah Mills’ art and curatorial practice are directly connected to her work as an End of Life Guide, relating to the deep psychology of death and rebirth of life and spirit, and how human relationships make life come into existence. The residencies she creates are deeply connected to transmutation, nature and morph with new environments.

In January 7, 2025, Mills experienced the total loss of her home, art studio and community in the Eaton Canyon Fire. The result of this trauma gave her the gift of nothing to lose. Through an art grant she attended residency at BKN in Björkö, Sweden. Her work went from mostly painting into full expansion with new mediums and utilising large-scale installation. Susannah also became devoted to giving this experience to other fire survivors. 

Following her stay she created the Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors artist residency in May, 2025. She partnered with Stockholm-based artist and curator Anna Viola-Hallberg and New York-based artist Rick Gradone, bringing thirteen artists severely affected by the fires back to BKN in September, 2025. For two months, they collectively healed, formed a new artist community, and created work scalable for exhibitions.

LAWS hopes to bring more fire survivors back to Sweden, furthering the alliance created between the two countries and giving other artists the opportunity to expand, create, and recover.

Instagram

@losangeleswildfiresurvivors

@susannarama

www.susannahmills.com

Jasmine Albuquerque-Croissant

Dance & Choreography

Jasmine Albuquerque is a choreographer, dancer, educator and physical

storyteller. She is a co-founder of the projection mapping dance trio WIFE and has performed with companies such as Hysterica, Blue13 Bollywood, Collage Dance Theater, and Ryan Heffington’s Fingered. 

She has done movement direction for Beyonce, Rihanna, St Vincent and Jennifer Lopez while creating and collaborating in performances such as Soft Sex, Istanbul Light Festival, TEDx SoCal, KTCHN, We Are The World, Frequency Festival, Jane’s Addiction and Hecuba. Most recently, she choreographed for NIN and Trent Reznor at Coachella in 2026. 

Various venues include the Hammer Museum, Zebulon, The El Rey, The Wiltern, MOCA, The Ford, Orpheum Theater, and LACMA. Jasmine has choreographed for Katy, Perry, Ivy Park, Puma x Balmain, St. Vincent, Devendra Banhart and danced in videos for Beck, Laura Marling, The Weekend, Miguel, Verve Records and many more. 

She has a degree in History from UCLA and trained in contemporary and psycho dance at the Edge Performing Arts Center and in Budapest, Hungary. She has been teaching dance for the past twenty one years in and around Los Angeles, Europe and Mexico and frequently collaborates with her Earthworks/Light&Space Land Artist mother Lita Albuquerque.

Instagram

@jasminealbuquerquecroissant

www.jasminealbuquerquecroissant

Rick Gradone

Rick Gradone holds a B.A. in Art History from Fairfield University in which he studied painting independently with Peter Michael Gish. Functioning at the intersection of geology and religion, his work imagines a new inclusive religion with the earth as its central figure. Structured as studies for shrines and monuments, his rock paintings and sculptures imagine spaces of worship and contemplation for all beings and suggest that revelation about this relationship has the power to create a new human responsibility to each other and to the planet. 

He has done residencies at Creekside Arts in Humboldt, CA, Belgrade Art 

Studio in Serbia, and La Wayaka in the Atacama Desert in Chile, Artesumapaz in Colombia, and BKN in Björko, Sweden. He is a co-curator for the Los Angeles

Wildfire Survivor Artist Residency and his work has been featured in Marie Claire Maison, Residence Magazine, Architectural Digest, and Medium. He lives and works in Delhi, NY.

Instagram

@rickgradoneprojects

www.rickgradoneart.com

Wren Petrichor Ossman

Wren Petrichor Ossman is a Research and Lens-Based Visual Artist born and raised in Altadena. They received First Class Honours in Fine Art Photography at The University of the Arts London. Ossman has exhibited domestically and in the United Kingdom, Italy, Stockholm, and South Korea. Their previous experience includes a virtual residency in collaboration with Ecofutures+Videotage and UAL, BKN, as well as a Risograph Printing Program at Fort London. 

Ecological grief and queer hauntology have always been prevalent in their work, which magnified after experiencing the Eaton Fire. Ossman lost digital work nearly finished for an upcoming exhibition, as well as part of their archive, due to soot and ash contamination. 

Wren’s work serves as a mirror, the visual opposition of the fire-scarred environment of Altadena, creating a conversation between dry sage-brush and the forests of Björko, a journey from a drought-ridden landscape to the damp, moss-covered earth by the Baltic Sea. 

Instagram

@wren_ossman

https:wpq.photography

Ivana Gross and Laressa Dickey

Dancer on the Plane
@dancer_on_the_plane (instagram)

Laressa Dickey and Ivana Gross

Performance and video installation
Duration: 30-60 min 

Dancer on the Plane explores the geometry between body, nature, and technology. Born from a 2025 exchange at BKN between dancer Laressa Dickey and conceptual artist Ivana Blanco Gross, the work begins with a dancer standing on a plane as a cuboid is drawn. Geometry becomes choreography; structure becomes lived experience. The cuboid—shape, system, metaphor—frames space like architecture, digital grids, or social systems. The dancer tests its limits, embodying lines through breath and resistance. Wrapped, framed, and observed, her body confronts containment. Against technological abstraction, the human body emerges as a fragile, sensing threshold that cannot be fully calculated or controlled. 

Laressa Dickey 

https://www.laressadickey.com

Laressa Dickey is a dance artist, writer, and bodyworker based in Stockholm whose recent projects explore the politics of care, the effects of state violence on the human body, and space junk. Her work spans disciplines and modalities. She’s the author of the poetry books Syncopations and Twang. Together with sound artist Andrea Steves, she published Radio Graveyard Orbit, a speculative book about space junk. For Bergen Assembly 2019, she and her partner Ali Gharavi created How to Pass Time With No Reference, an multi-media installation about their experiences inside/outside the Turkish prison system. A longtime student of somatic practice, her artistic research has been supported by the Kone Foundation; she researches the dancer’s use of language and the writer’s use to/for dance. She leads writing workshops from the perspective of poet/dancer/artist, working across and through discipline, and teaches Writing Alongside Artistic Practice, at SKH, an elective course which includes university students and working artists. Laressa is an active member of withing, an international cohort of Somatics and Language-Based artistic researchers; and a member of the performative collaboration MISLEADING SUBJECTS. 

Ivana Blanco Gross 

https://ivanablancogross.com

Ivana Blanco Gross is an American post-minimalist conceptual artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She studied at the University of Buenos Aires and at the Royal Academy of Art in The Netherlands. Her works have been shown extensively across three continents and is included in private and public collections. She explores the different perceptions of location across geographical space, translating her own connections to people and place into color works and multi-part installations. Specifically, she emphasizes the notion of location through the interaction and intersection of line, color, and geography. Her work often references topographical views of landscapes and cityscapes, and ultimately become intimate time-scapes. She uses different media to express content, such as paint, text, photography, object development, installations, video, and sound. 

Ivana is the founder and developer of several public and participative projects, including Un-Send, Grayland, the Whitest white and Hopscotch. Her latest works are a sound compositions based on the environmental sounds of the city of Venice, Italy and a multi part research and sound installation that comments on deterioration of the Arctic Circle. She lectures at universities and colleges throughout three continents; at community based groups as well as congresses and conferences. On occasion, she also gives private presentations. Recent exhibitions for Ivana Blanco Gross include Venice – Italy, Rauma – Finland and Cali – Colombia.

Zoey Hart and Maja Andersson

Seeking comfort

Multimedia visual/performance collaboration between Maja Anderson, Zoey Hart, their respective bodies, and the surrounding landscape. 

In Seeking Comfort, the pair works with body and landscape to build a visual narrative of life with chronic illness: alternating between different scales of time and states of fatigue, the feeling of constant heaviness against the pace of our social networks and natural worlds. 

In this initial work, stone represents externalized sensations of the body. We each carry a heavy stone, repositioning it on our bodies as we move across the stone landscape. Our bodies seek spaces of momentary stillness, as the sea moves quickly and steadily around us. Through trial and error of moving, settling, and re-settling, we perform the question: can we adapt to our bodily need for rest in a world that devalues slowness? 

We were each invited by curator Anna Viola Halberg to create work at Bjorkö Konstnod during the summer of 2022. As both of our works resonate with the experience of the unwell body through performance and artistic documentation, we quickly brought our bodies together in collaboration with the local landscape to amplify our collective need for rest (see: seeking comfort). 

Zoey Hart (Brooklyn, NY) comes from a background in interdisciplinary visual art and social practice (MA NYU 2015). She has worked closely with the Disability Arts community in NYC, and other socially engaged artist groups in Brooklyn and beyond. She previously directed Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency. Her focus is to work between the body and environment, relating bodies and natural spaces through themes of Care, Diagnosis, and Healing.
http://www.zoeyAhart.com

Maja Andersson is a visual artist, with the body as a central part of her practice. She has worked with performance art and is continuously exploring different mediums and forms of expression. She uses video, photography, fabrics, clay, sometimes in combination. The point of entry to her work is feelings as a state of mind, or a physical feeling in the body. By entering these feelings and sensations, she explores what is inside of us, and how we relate to it – willingly or unwillingly. 

https://www.anderssonmaja.com/