The project developed from 2024 onward and is protected by BONO and international copyright laws.
Landscape: Memories and Migrations Connecting Norway and Brazil
Amélia Siegel Corrêa, Mari Amman, Peter Knudsen
Brief
This artistic research project will look at and work with contemporary, multidisciplinary international artist Mari Amman, composer and pianist Peter Knudsen, and academic researcher and writer Amélia Siegel Corrêa. The trio will work with a contemporary analysis of Norwegian landscapes and seascapes relative to the formation of memories related to the construction of identities. Landscape and memory[10] is connected to Amman’s focus on creating artworks based on the affections places evoke and a value of nature over society. This priority of studying nature to reveal humans as creators with nature (not consumers) runs throughout contemporary Nordic-American artist Mari Amman’s work and the collaboration with Swedish jazz composer Peter Knudsen and Brazilian writer and researcher Amélia Siegel Corrêa inspired by the voyage of painter and sculptor Alfredo Emil Andersen’s move from Norway to Brazil. The creative works culminate in a poetic art documentary authored by Amélia Siegel Corrêa, documentation of Mari Amman’s artworks retracing the footsteps of Alfredo Emil Andersen before his migration to Brazil in the photography and poetry she will make and music by Peter Knudsen. Amman’s previous performances in Oslo were for the Solfege Souche and Afjordance videos, Trøndelag for Body Line, and Kjerringøy Land Art Residency for Blåtime Sol. Amman’s images and performances in the Norwegian nature have been sourced to create scenographies and collaborations with contemporary composers and performers Peter Knudsen, Bodil Lund Rørtveit, Berit Opheim, Tuva Halse, Amund Storløkken Åse. The artistic collaborations between Amman’s poetry, photos, paintings and performances, and musicians, with the documentary video and auto-ethnography by Corrêa will be published across the Nordics, Schengen countries, North and Latin America, and in South Korea and Japan.
Proposal
Landscapes are rich terrains provoking old memories and forming new impressions on the images recollected later. The research proposed is based on creating an auto-ethnographic publication and new creative artworks based on the meaning-making Landscapes provoke in emotions and memories. This notion of meaning-making relative to the memory body of sensorial human experience is worked with reference to Place (actual geography) and the ineffable realm that often drive creative instincts. The instincts to create and form new life are guided in this project of following the footsteps of Nordic painter and sculptor, Alfredo Emil Andersen, who moved to Brazil and married an indigenous woman. While recognized in Curitiba, Brazil, much of his work remains to be investigated in Norway, and inspired the artist Amman and researcher Corrêa in their conversation on the meaning-making of fulfilling dreams and creating a new life through landscape, memory, and imagination.
The cultural relationships with various emotions and the land inform the way human sensitivities are turned into mentalisations, or meaning making, through the constructs of individual, collective, migratory identities will be researched, written about and used as a means for creating artwork, poetry, and an eventual publication (book/essay) and video/documentary. The Landscape Memories and Migrations are focused on the Nordic values of sustainability, cultural exchange, and making the Nordics an attractive example for the emerging need for cultural values of human activity that is in harmony with the demands to heal and regrow healthy ecology and economies.
As humanity ventures into increasingly interconnected awareness through the internet, the making Amman will do alongside Corrêa’s recovery of this historical figure in art, will look at the significance of art and cultural work, to preserve and raise the historic values in Nordic arts in their particular, and richly interwoven themes of life revering nature. One of the theories in Norwegian art history is the indication of pattern recognition in Norwegian art and craftwork particularly in their objects such as in Rosemaler. Rosemaler is a form of decorative arts, often presented on cups, chairs, and details of cultural artefacts of Norway. The closeness with nature Norwegian people feel is the theory and particular symbology such as Rosemaler are what Amman will work with to explore the driving force in Andersen’s pursuit of a better life, as well relation with a woman can be considered as having a higher value for nature than society (such as in indigenous cultural values). Amman’s life work reflects this deep value for nature, and the Reimaginations (also the title of Knudsen’s forthcoming musical release) of the ties between Norway and Brazil run concurrent with her work, Corrêa’s research, and Knudsen’s multiple journey’s to Brazil for jazz composition.
Landscape and Memory made a deepening in Amman’s work with understanding nature through photography, painting, poetry, video, sound, artistic research and performances. Tracing her auto-ethnography through her ancestral roots in the Nordics, Italy, and Americas, has led to learning histories involving biology, engineering, social and political sciences, including cultural and earthly resources and the ethics of commodity exchange. Her research projects studying water, geology, AI, imaging technology are used to create installations on cultural themes of beauty, taboo, violence, resources, and is centered on making a shift of viewing nature as something to revere instead of dominate. She has collaborated with musicians to produce scenographic videos for musical performances, and avant-garde video performances to evoke the spiritual, nonverbal, abstract relationships between humans and nature. Amman’s value for the human relationship with nature reaches through contemporary concepts of epigenetic and Technocratic Primitivism, French-Expressionism and Germanic-Billdung, through ancient mystic, esoteric and indigenous knowledge. The body as a vessel of memory looks into the ways landscape cultivates spiritual connection through visuals, installations, and the influence of sound and colour on the nervous system. The particular notion of “Thin Places” as Amman learned collaborating with Knudsen for the cover of All in Twilight, poses a connection to the ineffable and difficult to describe notions such as spirituality and fate.
Amman will work with the concepts presented in Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory suggesting Landscape promises salvation, reconciliation with mortality, deeper consciousness, and mystic knowledge spanning the spectrum of horror and delight. Corrêa’s auto-ethnographic framework in recovering important artistic and bibliography facts on Andresen will guide Amman’s productions of poetry, photography, video, sketches and painting in Seterdahl and Sørlandet where Andersen and his colleagues lived and worked. This story is likely to open up the meaning-making of synchronicities across long expanses of time and geography. Alongside the plan for creating a publication with Amman’s artworks and Corrêa’s writings and documentation on Andersen will be a video, with music by Peter Knudsen.
Mari Amman: https://mariamman.net, mariamman.net/all-in-twilight/, https://mariamman.net/solfege-souche/, https://mariamman.net/afjordance/, https://mariamman.net/stop-bath/, https://mariamman.net/la-mer/, mariamman.net/aesthetic-resonances/
Amélia Siegel Corrêa has established a commitment to Nordic cultural research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Dept. of Anthropology and as a researcher of the project Global Europe: Constituting Europe from the Outside In through Artefacts. She holds a Ph.D in Sociology of Art and Culture (University of São Paulo) as well as a M.A. in Sociology (Federal University of Paraná). Before joining the Global Europe project, she was a postdoc fellow at the Federal University of Paraná, with research about gender and art; she is also a member of the research group Woman and Cultural Production in Brazil. Amelia has taught Sociology and Art History in several institutions in Brazil and authored a number of research publications, including a book about the Norwegian-Brazilian painter Alfred Andersen (her PhD topic). She has also worked at the Alfredo Andersen’s Museum in Curitiba for two years, and has curated exhibitions for the gallery she works with Alhures Galeria. As part of the Global Europe project, Amélia Corrêa explores how the collection, circulation, classification and museum exhibition of objects define Europe from the outside in. Her research takes place in museums in Brazil as well as in Europe using anthropological, historical and sociological methods. In KU Amelia was responsible for Master’s Thesis Seminar and Workshop Moderator for Global Politics Course (Master in Global Development), both in Spring 2016. Amélia’s gallery in Brasil: http://alhuresgaleria.com
Peter Knudsen is a Swedish pianist, composer and Ph.D. candidate in Artistic Research at NTNU in Trondheim. Since 2010, Knudsen has also been teaching jazz piano, improvisation and ensemble playing as Senior Lecturer in Music Performance at Örebro University. His albums explore themes as diverse as French Impressionism, Swedish Romanticism, and Japanese art music. These include the album “Nature Spirits” with the Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, “All in Twilight” with classical guitarist David Härenstam, and his forthcoming solo album “Reimaginations”. As part of a teacher exchange, Peter traveled to Brazil on five occasions, as well as toured with his Swedish-Brazilian trio featuring drummer Kiko Freitas and bassist Zeca Assumpção.
Proposed Plan, main activities 2024 – 2025, publishing to coincide/follow
2023 – Planning/meetings, literature review, research methods
2024 – Research methods, fieldwork, documentary material, poetry, artwork, writing article 1
2025 – Fieldwork, editing documentary, artwork, organizing poetry, writing article 2
2026 – Writing article 3, finalize documentary, writing monograph, editing anthology, publishing all materials
Publishing Plans
Spring 2026 – Book publication – monograph North in the South: life and painting of a Norwegian caboclo. The monograph will be based on a revision of the PhD thesis, with a new introduction and the incorporation of the sources and new analyses obtained during the postdoc period. To be published in English in Norway.
Autumn 2026 – NorWhite Anthology Publication + Art documentary based on the postdoc (if funding is available).
(Additional possible book publisher based in DK: https://snap-collective.com)
Selected Bibliography
[1] KRAG, Vilhelm. Min Bardoms Have. Oslo, 1926.
[2] TRONSTAD, Roger. Dronningens gate 21 i årene 1818-1892. In: Årbok 2008. Wergelandsfamilien og Kristiansand. Vest-Agder Museet, 2008. p.145.
[3] Berger, Martin. Sight Unseen. Whiteness and American Visual Culture. Berkley: University of California Press, 2005.
[4] PILOTO, Valfrido. O acontecimento Andersen. Curitiba: Mundial, 1960, p. 57.
[5] BHABHA, Homi. The Location of Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2004.
[6] MARIN, Louis. Sublime Poussin. São Paulo: Edusp, 2001. p.22.
[7] 2024/2025/2026 divided in trimesters.
[8] The journals may change, as well as the focus of the articles. p.145.
[9] Grossinger, Richard, Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity, 2000.
[10] Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory, 1996.
Budget
We seek a grant from For Art to faciliate the collaboration of the international research between Amman (NO), Corrêa (BR), and Knudsen (SE). Meanwhile we will continue to apply for the future development of the project and its long term goals with the support from Globus Opstart, FrittOrd, and others to carry out the Nordic-Brazilian project through as many channels as possible. At present we estimate a median grant of 150,000nok to cover the research expenses.
