The project developed from 2023 onward and is protected by BONO and international copyright laws.
Landscape, Memory, Eros
Amélia Siegel Corrêa, Mari Amman, Peter Knudsen
Images on this page were made by Mari Amman with the support of Kjerringøy Land Art Residency.
Original concept and text by Amélia Siegel Corrêa 2023. Edit by Mari Amman 2023 – 2024.
Brief
This artistic research work aims to create new art on paper and linen, poetry, performances, articles and a documentary with soundtrack. The ‘North-Star’ for the collaboration is a personal, open sharing to look at place-making and the ethics of Eros as a means to remember and reflect an individual and pluralistic humanity.
The collaboration between contemporary, global artist Mari Amman and academic researcher and author Amélia Siegel Corrêa, is inspired by composer and pianist Peter Knudsen through the unifying element of an auto-ethnographic approach to support underrepresented and obscured histories. The connections between the Nordics and Brazil only scratch the surface of the multilayered, nuanced histories place making and eros have with landscape. An example is the story of Amman’s amber necklace. After a serendipitous meeting when she gave away her Western-philosophy books, a friendship and mentorship with John Wagner emerged. Amman was given a gift, a piece of amber that had washed ashore on Jutland, Danmark, most likely from a Brazilian forest and carried by storm forces to Scandinavia. This amber necklace became a symbolic totem of curiosity following Amman’s interest in the way reality works with and without human intervention.
Further following and exposing strange twists of fate and serendipitous chance, the work investigates the merits and intelligence of Intuition. Instead of posture, logic, or canons, Amman and Corrêa work with an inner compass, focused on the value of the deeply relational human experience of landscape, memory, and Eros. By exploring nuanced histories obscured from public knowledge, the collaboration references landscapes and seascapes to reflect upon the often misunderstood energy and use of Eros as typified by global capital systems. Removing forms of divisive personal constructs such as gender, nationality, or class, while preserving the virtue of individual motive, the work arises from the deep roots each collaborator has through their commitment to the relative good of psychological, spiritual, and biological human needs.
Auto-ethnography, and matters of the heart and spirit present the impossibility of control within deeply embodied individuals. Mari Amman’s desire for people to remember their creative agency resulted in Solfège Souche and Afjordance videos in Oslo, Body Line in Trøndelag, and Blåtime Sol in Kjerringøy for the Land Art Residency. Amman’s images and performances in Nordic the countryside have been sourced to create scenographies and collaborations with contemporary composers and performers, including Peter Knudsen, Bodil Lund Rørtveit, Berit Opheim, Tuva Halse, Amund Storløkken Åse. The notion of Thin Places, or places where the deeply intuited can be heard and transformed, poses a connection to the ineffable and challenging notions of spirituality and fate, guiding Amman’s extensive travails and collaborative work with Knudsen during his PhD at NTNU. Brazilian researcher and author Amélia Siegel Corrêa’s cultural, curatorial, and documentary work between the Nordics and Brazil, unifies the trios interests in generating an engaging series of artworks, proposed to result in text, video, paintings, poetry, voice and music performances. A poetic, art documentary, with public performances and publications are ideal outcomes of this proposal.
Proposal
The Nordic landscapes are rich terrain, provoking old memories and forming new impressions as sense-images recollected later. Referencing existing music and art history, creating auto-ethnographic publications with nuanced histories, and creating new artworks are to be based on meaning-making landscapes that provoke emotions and memories. This notion of meaning-making relative to the body memory of sensorial human experience is worked with reference to Place (actual geography) and the ineffable realm of Intuition, often driving creative instincts in both art and life. The instinct to create life itself is often used as a weapon or tool in narratives of power. Cultural relationships with notions of space and land, including that of the body and emotions, have transformed every level of human experience into a realm of potential exploitation of Eros, or the life force. While land and bodies can signal particularities of eros, the meaning is expanded through projects to guide discourse in a caring and responsible framework. The typified liberal and conservative axis have distortions, aims, and stories each own. In this way, abstractions of forms in the landscape and sea are used to examine the way human sensitivities are turned into mentalizations, to be used in warfare, if not in life, but in bodies.
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 richly interwoven themes of a life revering nature. Often identified as Nordic, Indigenous, as well as other themes, the work Amman and Corrêa aim to do is to expand on these identities into a broader context.
This project is designed as a starting point for ongoing collaboration between Amman and Corrêa, as well as Knudsen and artists that may be taken up in the future. Researching the constructs of individual, collective, migratory identities is planned to be part of the writing Corrêa does. Amman’s artwork and poetry will be used in an eventual publication (book/essay) and video/documentary. The Landscape Memories and Eros are focused on Nordic values of sustainability, cultural exchange, and making the Nordics an attractive example of the emerging need for cultural values of human activity by looking at the driving force that creates life itself. Therefore, the project bridges multiple territories and landscapes in the pursuit of exposing the intelligence behind the diminishing biodiversity on the planet, with the aim of looking at how to let nature take its course. With this knowledge, the demands to heal and regrow a healthy ecology and economy reside not in typified power structures but in the intuitive, creative process.
Corrêa was inspired by several creatives such as 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. This curiosity spurred Amman and Corrêa to explore the meaning-making of fulfilling dreams and creating life as breathed through new landscapes, that uncover memories, and ignite imagination. Corrêa will site specific theories in Norwegian art history, such as the indication of pattern recognition in Norwegian art and craft-work, particularly in their objects, such as in Rosemaler. Rosemaler is a form of decorative art, often presented on cups, chairs, and details of cultural artifacts of Norway. The closeness with nature Norwegian people feel is a theory tied to symbology such as Rosemaler. Amman will work with Corrêa to explore the driving force in Andersen’s pursuit of a better life, as well to recover an understanding relationship with an Indigenous woman, who can be considered as having a higher value to nature than society. Amman’s work reflects this deep value for nature based on her upbringing in a rural area, surrounded by forest, prairie, and nuclear generating station which exposed her to philosophy and physics at an early age. Peter Knuden’s ties between Norway and Brazil run concurrent with Amman and Corrêa, due to his multiple journeys to Brazil for jazz composition.
Landscape, memory, and eros [10] deeply connect to Amman’s artworks based on living with synesthesia. Her value of humanity and nature over societal constructs described in modern and postmodernist texts has created a multidisciplinary practice involving images, installations, paintings, poetry, textiles, performances using deeply sensual textures, pigments, materials and forms to evoke personal memories within the viewer. Tracing her auto-ethnography through her ancestral roots in the Nordics, Italy, and the Americas, led to learning histories in 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 beauty, taboo, violence, resources, and are centered on making a shift to viewing nature as something to revere instead of dominate. She collaborated with musicians to produce scenographic videos for musical performances, 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 the landscape cultivates spiritual connection through visuals, installations, and the influence of sound and color on the nervous system. For Amman, her heart is involved. In a Canonical Chinese Medicine perspective of five-element theory, the heart is what creates the mind. This perspective has resonated as true through Amman’s entire being. She offers, this perspective is why most canons in professional art and academia are not used, for it the vulnerability serves some kind of use. Instead of an aim, her motive is to inspire deep reflection, reevaluation, care, understanding, and acceptance. For those who do not work to expose the heart, do not, because they dare not to die or go crazy, so, instead they pretend to love. The act of altruism serves as a performance, which ends up being complicit in the systemic usages of art. Her theory, is that society encourages others to think about themselves so much because of an interpretative nihilistic belief of the individual as the start and finish, or solely responsible character for their life. In reality, humans are relational, and therefore must always check ideas in context of reality. For Amman, to know one’s heart, means to openly share one’s mind with all the risks that choice entails.
Biographies
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 Artifacts. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology of Art and Culture (University of São Paulo) as well as an 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 Museum in Curitiba for two years, and has curated exhibitions for Alhures Galeria in Brazil. 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. Her research takes place in museums in Brazil as well as in Europe using anthropological, historical and sociological methods. At KU, Amelia was responsible for the Master’s Thesis Seminar and Workshop Moderator for Global Politics Course (Master in Global Development), both in Spring 2016.
Amman works with the concepts in Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, suggesting the Landscape promises salvation, reconciliation with mortality, deeper consciousness, and mystic knowledge spanning the spectrum of horror and delight. The artists’ lived experiences with synesthesia and as a migrant who pursued her heart will carry throughout the Corrêa’s auto-ethnographic framework in recovering important artistic and bibliography facts. Amman’s productions will include poetry, photography, video, drawing, painting, performances (proposed in Seterdahl, Sørlandet and others). 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 will art, a documentary, and a video with Peter Knudsen. Previous works in Amman include collaboration with Knudsen: Reimaginations, All In Twilight, Solfège Souche, Afjordance, Stop Bath, La Mer, Aesthetic Resonances.
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 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.
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.
[11] Reality As Stratification of Surfaces: The Concept of Transit In Perniola’s Philosophy
[12] In Praise of a Strategic Beauty Mario Perniola
Budget
We seek a grant from For Art to facilitate 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..
Photography of Nevelsfjorden by Mari Amman, supported by Kjerringøy Land Art, Bodø Kommune, Kulturrådet
