Yearly Calendar & Events

Tuuli Teelahti (Finland)
Jessica MacMillan (Norway)
Amy Cutler & Sapphire Goss (UK)

Jonna Hägg (Sweden)
Jessica MacMillan (Norway)
Hole of Struggle with Time (Russia)

Anja Sidler (Switzerland)

Örö Summer Camps

Exhibition building time plus shorter residency periods for artists who have visited Örö previously.

Nigel Helyer

Kristian Jalava

Liina Aalto-Setälä

Petri Juntunen

Caitlin Pickall

Salla Salin

Yu Wen
Pingchi Hung
Jen Pei Chen

Ari Saarto
Riitta Päiväläinen

Pia Palme

Marja Salo

AUKEA: Eveliina Hämäläinen & Petri Saarikko

Between Islands: Grace Phillips & Hanna Nielsen

A production residency programme co-produced by three residency organizations in the archipelago area.

Örö Summer Camps

Short residency periods for artists who have visited Örö previously.

Ari Saarto

Mari Krappala, Tiina Vainio, Laura Ruohonen, Kati Immonen

Becky Brewis

Mirjam Kroker

Teija Puranen

Nina-Maria Oförsagd

Katalin Vasali

Peppi Reenkola

Anne Järvi (FI)

Anne Järvi (b. 1988) is Turku-based visual artist. She graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in arts from Tampere University of Applied Sciences. Järvi works primarily with drawing, hand-drawn animation and textile sculpture and addresses themes such as competition, power and failure. She mostly relies on a single line, and creates series and sequences to repeat the same message over and over again.

In addition to her own individual practice she collaborates within different collectives.

In Örö island Järvi wants to escape the real world and work inside her own bubble. She will explore escapism and isolation and create work reflecting them.

www.annejarvi.fi

Catarina Ricci (PT)

Catarina was born in Lisbon in 1984. She studied Film in Argentina and Brazil and has been working as writer and director for documentary and narrative fiction. Moreover themes such gender, identity and borders are often found in her program / curatorial work, as well as her aesthetic interest in body movement and the use of silence.

My work in the island will be focused on visual and sound research on the concepts of periferic, marginal and isolated. That research firstly consisting of still and moving image, then of soundscapes, will be the foundation for a following narrative writing process. All to be applied on a feature film that I am currently developing.

Michaela Casková (FI)

I am picker and collector. And also visual artist, illustrator, mediator. Collecting mushrooms, berries, needles and twigs as the path beyond the horizon of consciousness. Actually, I think I’m kind of sleeping while picking in the woods. One little walk can be a thousand year-long journey connected to a time when forests were really dense.

I am collecting stories, texts, drawings, sound recordings and documents that deal with being in the unknown, crossing territories, investigation of human fear (or supposed danger) in nature. My tools are walking, observing, asking, talking, being in silence, imagining, picking, mapping, and drawing. I’m obsessed with watching weather forecasts and observing how numbers and data really feel when you run outside.

How weather talks became small talks – instead, look out the window in the morning and see what the day will be. And how this small talk affects if you have any visitors in your small gallery in the city.

Working title for my project I will work on in Örö is After wolves there will come sooner or later bears. I try to look at fear in different meanings, look at the moments when we feel (un)safe or (un)comfortable in forests and nature in general. Collected material (mainly drawings) will be used as well in book I am working on together with finish environmentalist and great storyteller Riitta Nykänen. Our book is intended to explore nature and habitat of fears, so that reading a book by the kids and adults will provide safe space and tools for handling with different kind of fears hiding in woods.

Tanja Engelberts (NL)

Tanja Engelberts (1987, NL) lives and works in The Hague. The perception of landscape through photography and material play is the core of her artistic practice. She graduated from a master fine art at Chelsea College of Art & Design after studying sculpture and monumental arts in both the Netherlands and Japan.  Her works are included in the collections (a.o.) of Clifford Chance (UK), Nationale Nederlanden (NL), the Ucross Foundation (USA) and various private collections.

Örö will provide a place to work in solitude on my first artist book, a project about the industrial landscape of the North Sea. The past year I’ve investigated offshore production islands on the North Sea. I’ve spent time on different ships documenting life at sea.  The artificial cities of concrete and metal in an apparent empty sea leave a lot to the imagination.

Working on the book would not be my only goal for a stay at Örö.  The exploration of Örö’s military history and its imprint upon the landscape would be part of my time on the island. The theme of shifting uses for a landscape forms a field of interest. How do you see the transformation from a militaristic island to an island of nature and leisure? Spending time on this secluded island gives me the time to re-evaluate my photographic practice and develop a new body of work.

Juhana Lahti (FI)

Juhana Lahti (1973-) is an art historian and holds a PhD at the University of Helsinki (2006). Lahti works currently as the Head of Research / Director of Collections at the Museum of Finnish Architecture (MFA) in Helsinki. In his research and publications Lahti has focused on the history of modern architecture and planning, especially on the post Second World War decades. He is also interested in questions related to digital paradigm shift in culture. Previously Lahti has worked in different positions at the MFA, University of Helsinki and Finnish Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York City.​

Dana Neilson (FI)

Dana Neilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, Finland.  A photographer by education her practice has grown to include ceramics, sculpture and video art.   The overarching theme is her work is the relationship humans have with their environment and how our physical world influences our interior selves.  At the moment her main points of inquiry are what’s natural about human nature? Order vs. disorder (culture vs. nature) and ceramics from scratch. She will graduate this fall from Aalto University Finland with a Master’s of Visual Culture and Contemporary Art.

While at the Örö Residency I will create an art-based field guide of the island, specifically of my wanderings and findings.  It will come together as a series of maps, photographs, audio-recordings, words and ceramic sculptures. It will not be a complete catalogue of any one thing on the island but instead of my daily exploration and the collections that ensue.  I have recently been in Iceland researching the use of raw materials in the construction of ceramic glazes and I will continue this at Örö.

This project is about time and place, memory, collection, and our ever-changing environment.  I am interested in the way we use collections to house memories, and the way the value of an object changes when it becomes our own.

Tuomo Savolainen (FI)

Tuomo Savolainen works primarily with installation, video and sound.  He graduated from Kankaanpää Art school in 2012 and is finishing his MA studies at Aalto university this year.   His work deals with expectation, preconceived ideas, the obviously unexpected and humor, whether it’s funny or not.  He creates films in unanticipated formats as well as farfetched installations of geological, meteorological and cultural phenomena.

During the Örö residency he is working with a contemplative multimedia piece which explores the colour and the shape of the water at set times and from a series of fixed location daily.

Laura Pugno (IT)

I’m a multidisciplinary artist who have worked in photography, installation, video, drawing. I have been working on landscapes for years, namely, on the critique of the traditional vision of landscape. In this project I have analysed landscape as a social construct, and I have attempted at overcoming the conditioning deriving from a purely visual notion of the landscape itself.

My goal is to trace the concepts and procedures that enable a tactile interpretation and depiction of landscape. I am persuaded that touch – which has always been recognised as the most necessary to life of the five senses – helps discover uncharted sensory territories.

www.laurapugno.info

Grace Phillips (US)

The exact nature of the relationship between language and the world is long-debated philosophical problem, but in our current ecological crisis, language is actively building the future world. Political skirmishes in forums like the Climate Change Conferences overwords like ‘shall’ and ‘should’ will translate into the literal existence or disappearance ofhabitable territory.

I situate my writing practice within this context. I plan to use my time on Oro to create a project of ‘terrapoetics’, a concept borrowed German philosopher Daniel Falb to describe the problem that ‘the anthropocene’ poses for conceptual poetry. Poetry as a form allows for the most open approach to writing-as-research, which will be my main method for exploring the human/‘nature’ binary. This problem – location of the self – within the Capitalocene (more accurate term for ‘anthropocene’ condition in my opinion) becomes a question of vantage points. Environmental politics is in need of a different way of ordering and describing relationships, which are spatial, material and real, without being objects. This way of speaking should resist the temptation for objectification, since an external vantage point is not possible in the “absolute interiority” of the capitalocene. My work instead begins from the necessity for ways of speaking that are intertwined and lateral, and will attempt to imagine how our ecological condition might change the way we see ourselves in it.

Archipelago AiR Exchange & Visitors

The first steps of our Archipelago AiR Exchange Program, with artists from other AiR programmes spending time in Örö. We also organized visits by various collaborators and our personnel to the residency.

Rob St John, David Chatton Barker & Jake Bee (UK)

The work created and continued on Örö in June 2017 is intended to form the basis of a collaborative exhibition and installation with a parallel publication, to be shown in Glasgow (and ideally, a Finnish location) in 2018.

Sophie Dvořák (AT)

Sophie Dvořák is a visual artist based in Vienna, Austria. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Glasgow School of Art.

During the residency at Örö I want to to do a specific exploration of the island, a subjective mapping, thus creating abstractions of found structures, documented through drawings, collages, small sculptures/found objects, text and sound. During “fieldtrips” I will gather information of the area in order to create an archive that will serve as a basis for further processes of  analyzing and abstracting.

The outcome of these investigations will be summarized in an artist book, in the style of an Atlas, entitled 2km2.

www.sophiedvorak.net

Laura Böök (FI)

Laura Böök works with photography, moving image and text. Her earlier projects have explored identity, place and displacement and personal and collective memory.

Laura has a BA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport and is studying an MA in Photography at Aalto University of Art and Design in Helsinki. Her work has been exhibited in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, India and Singapore.

Laura Böök is using her residency for contemplation on madness and the sea. She is interested in the connections between mind, body and landscape.  Water is an unknown element, often used as a metaphor for the unconscious and uncontrollable parts of the human mind. Laura is combining her artistic work with research on the cultural history of madness and photography’s role in recording the visible and imagined signs of madness.

cargocollective.com/laurabook

Lu Zhang (US)

Lu Zhang (b. 1983, Chongqing, China) is a multidisciplinary artist who has worked in installation, sculpture, drawing, and text. She received a MFA in Painting from the Frank Mohr Institute in the Netherlands in 2013. Lu received a BFA in General Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in the United States. She has exhibited in the US and abroad including shows at C. Grimaldis Gallery, Randall Scott Gallery, The Center for Art and Culture in France, as well as several exhibitions in the Netherlands. Lu has received a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council for works on paper and been awarded The Trawick Prize Young Artist Award. In 2014, she became an inaugural recipient of a Rubys Artist Project Grant in Literary and Visual Arts.

In my work I explore the gaps and overlaps between artistic practice and meaning making and the labor practices, tasks, and skills common in other fields. In a recent project, I collaborated with a librarian on a site-specific work to be exhibited at the library and become a part of the collection. Through processes common to the site (a library operates by choosing, collecting, sorting, organizing, replacing, shifting, relocating, preserving, and sharing), I created a stack of six books that a reader navigates and moves through as a visitor may stroll through the 6 tiers of the library’s architecture and collection. My way of working is to observe and live with an environment; the eventual work is a result of my experience. I expect to spend my time during the residency writing, drawing, making maps, exploring the site, and creating an archive by documenting the textures, landscape, and other sensory experiences of the island. This archive serves as a source to further explore how language can exist in space and be navigated and experienced by one’s body.

www.lu-zhang.com

Milla Toukkari (FIN)

Milla Toukkari graduated in 2015 with an MA from the Academy of Fine Arts in University of the Arts in Helsinki. She is a printmaker whose practice explores the essentially constructed nature of image, and the exposure of it. Her works concern how images direct, produce and create thinking, and how this thinking can be touched through re-purposing different visual means of presentation. Toukkari describes her work as extended collages, through which she aims at defining the preconditions of visual thinking.

In addition to her works that mainly take their from on the medium of paper, she also writes and teaches. During the Örö residency, she is going work primarily on two exhibitions that revolve around the concept of collage: how collage is not only a method for composing and decomposing images but rather represents the principle according which everything is being organized and made possible to think of.

www.millatoukkari.com/

Falk Morawitz (UK)

I have a Master’s degree in chemistry as well as music composition and I am particularly interested in the areas where science, art and music meet. I am currently exploring how chemistry-based art can contribute towards wider anthropogenic challenges we are facing today: In what way can it add meaningfully towards the discourse about, for example, global warming or Alzheimer’s disease?

To find answers to these questions I am creating science-inspired art in a wide range of media: From acousmatic compositions for concert halls, multi-media works, sound art exhibited in art galleries to virtual reality environments.

Staying on the Örö Island, I plan to re-create the island virtually, as part of a new media interactive audio-visual art work. The virtual recreation will be based on 3 different aspects of the Örö Island: Its landscape, its soundscape, as well as the chemical environment of the island. I will create a computer generated landscape faithfully recreating the landscape features of Örö and featuring the sounds recorded on the island. However, while initially being almost unaltered, the visual and aural aspects will become more and more abstracted (and distorted) if a high amount of chemical pollution is associated with the location. The audience will be able to navigate through the virtual space selecting their own points of interests.

Linda Reif & Andreas Waldén (AT)

Linda Reif is an artist born and based in Vienna. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Kuvataideakatemia in Helsinki and Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. Her work is strongly linked to her interest in lens-based media and her work methods reflect the disrespectful and unsentimental way she approaches photography. She focuses on the gestures of creating images without aiming for technical perfection.

Linda will push her experimental approach to photography further. With self-built pinhole cameras and her mobile phone she wants to capture the conflicting character of the island; its military sites in relation to the flora and fauna. She is interested in the violent presence of the abandoned architecture of the fortress and its dysfunctional presence as remains of human failure and resignation. The main focus will lie on the distortion of image perception and production, the “non glossy” impact of images while investigating in the vulnerability of photography and the poetic beauty of visual imperfection.

www.lindareif.com

Andreas Waldén is a visual artist from Sweden based in Vienna, who primarily works with painting and drawing. His works deal with spatiality, surface, movement and mortality. Waldén recieved his MFA from the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 2008.

During his time at the Örö residency programme he will explore the idea of trance in connection with repetition and monotony. The research will result in a series of ink drawings.

www.andreaswalden.com

Alice Olga Perets (FR)

Born in Ukraine, I graduated from the French National Photography School of Arles in 2012. For many years my main interest was the exploration of the Soviet heritage in post-Soviet countries, such as my native Ukraine, as well as Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and Georgia. I have also created several series focused on subjective worlds and interior landscapes, among which the series “Under the Roots”, “Shimmers” and “Beats”.

During my stay in residency I would like to build a new body of work around the notion of “Island”, looking for ways to translate by photographical means the symbolical connotations attached to this term. Also, I’ll try to collect Örö’s sounds in order to join an acoustic aspect to the visual part of the project.

Alžběta Wolfova (CZ)

Ilkka Pitkänen (FIN)

Ilkka Pitkänen (b. 1981) is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary artist working with various media including moving images, photography, installation and performance. Thematically his artworks are dealing with personal space, integrity and the perception of reality. His works have been presented in many exhibitions both in Finland and internationally.

www.ile1.com

William Matheson (US)

Will Matheson lives and works in Virginia, USA. He recently obtained his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and received his BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2013. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. Working predominantly in video, Matheson’s current work navigates the limits and conflicts involved with interactions with non-human life and ecology. At Örö Matheson will work towards creating a fluid video essay that explores our contemporary, often times technologically mediated relationship to sleep, and by metaphorical extension, death.

Juliana Svistova (US)

Juliana Svistova is a writer, educator, critical scholar, and a concerned global citizen. Her scholarship is concerned with community development and participatory approaches to social change in local and transnational contexts. She also studies organizational dimensions of policy implementation in practice. Juliana has a focused interest in disasters, interpretation of natural disasters, and resultant policy, practice, and grassroots responses to these events. She is a community-engaged, interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of social work, policy, public health and education.

During her stay at Örö Residency, Juliana will be working on a co-authored book titled “The Social Production of Disaster and Recovery in Post-Earthquake Haiti” to be published as a part of the Routledge Humanitarian Series. The book critically disentangles the power of dominant ideas, discourses, and frames, explaining their subtle operations in and contributions to the social production of disasters and recovery. Using the Haiti earthquake as an example and an extensive body of data, the research reveals how intangible thoughts, words, and ideas of the powerful few may become truly tangible in the lives of the marginalized majority who rarely get to generate and promote their thoughts, words, and ideas. Through de-constructive, interpretive analysis of a diverse range of disaster discourses, the authors seek to unveil and re-imagine this contradiction by offering a transformative way forward in a world of growing disaster risk and vulnerability. Notably, these insights into the social production of disaster specific to Haiti are applicable and transferrable to other settings, particularly those vulnerable to environmental threats.

Jamie Allen (CH)

Shift Register is a newly funded research project at the Critical Media Lab Basel. It is an investigation into how human technological and infrastructural activities have marked the earth. The project is conducted by artist-researchers Jamie Allen, Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

jamieallen.com

Maarten van Aken (NL)

Maarten van Aken is a Dutch painter born in Lelystad. He briefly studied Industrial Design before switching to AKI Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. After graduating in 2012 he won the Buning Brongers prize and the HeArtfund, a one year residency program.

In his paintings, stillness, solitude and a tangable tension come together. Light, and the defining effect it has on interior and himself, seem to be an important part of his motive and a link to abstraction. Interiors that are not interiors, empty spaces that are not empty: They dissolve in paint.

At Örö he wil shift his focus usually aimed at his own studio to this true solitary space to find out what solitary means for his work. A search for simplicity, light, beauty, space and silence.

www.maartenvanaken.nl

Johanna Heikkilä & Jarno Parkkima (FIN)

We are travelling to the island of Örö to gaze at the sea and it’s fragmentary waves – to witness and be in relation to its constant change. This project canl be seen farewell to sea as a source of inspiration. Through our work we’ve discovered the limitations of a picture as a medium of representation and narration. The picture rather indicates the connection between a subject and an object at the very moment when the image is being created – although this connection is hardly ever visible at the resulting picture. While in Örö we’ll also be in dialogue with people from different backgrounds and profession and exchange our experiences and views about the meaning of sea.

Antti Kauppinen & Paavo Halonen (FIN)

armasaika.tumblr.com

www.paavohalonen.com

In September – after a summer break – we moved to a new house called “Mekka”, having now two apartments for the residency programme. We also offered artists from the pilot period to do a short re-visit to the residency in order to complete or continue their projects.

Visiting artists in September:
Lilla Haapala & Camilla Edström Ödemark (FIN/SWE)
Erika Kallasmaa, Petri Kumela & Laura Ruohonen (FIN)

Erika Kallasmaa, Petri Kumela & Laura Ruohonen (FIN)

OTUS is a collaboration between visual artist Erika Kallasmaa, musician Petri Kumela and writer Laura Ruohonen. It is based on the material Kumela has collected over several years: miniature pieces for solo guitar by contemporary composers, all depicting some small creature. Using them as a starting point the artists will create an audiovisual work with poetry exploring the concepts of scale and miniature. The project will make visible and give voice and language to the smallest of creatures, those who are not seen nor heard. Ruohonen has her background in biology and the work will play with the conventions of natural science and art research.

Visual artist Erika Kallasmaa (MA) works on a wide range of projects, scales, materials and platforms from books to theatre, television, playgrounds and architechture. Recent works include visual art for children´s tv-series and artworks for Helsinki City playground and Eastern Finland kindergarden. At the moment Kallasmaa is working on tile murals for an upcoming Helsinki City Kindergarden and an illustrated poems book with Laura Ruohonen. 2013 she received the State Prize for Illustration.

Petri Kumela, one of Finland’s most versatile and sought-after classical guitarists, is equally at home with period instruments as in working with contemporary composers. He is also one of the Finnish guitarists best known on the international scene, with a reputation for originality and versatility. Petri Kumela has appeared outside Finland in many European countries, South America, the United States, Russia, Japan, India and Bhutan. An artist with a special commitment to contemporary music, Kumela has premiered dozens of works both in Finland and abroad. He has made several recordings and live broadcasts.

Laura Ruohonen is one of the most prominent Finnish playwrights. Studies in literature and biology,  MA at dramaturgy. Writer in residence in Finnish National theatre, professor of dramaturgy at the Theatre Academy 2008-2013. Her writing includes plays e.g. award winning Olga, Queen C , Yksinen and Wartourists, movie scripts, radio plays, TV-films, poetry and essays.  Her latest works are TV-series Stayawakes and play Luolasto at FNT. Currently she is writing a new play, a libretto and a poetry book. Her work has been translated into over 20 languages. She has received Pro Finlandia  and Kordelin Literature prizes.

Aino Mäntynen (FIN)

Aino Mäntynen is a Finnish sculptor born in Kontiolahti, East Karelia. She has studied her BA in Kankaanpää Art School (Samk), and has recently started her Master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki. Her works are often visual mindscapes that had been constructed using residue materials. She has recently started researching qualities that string and installations based on it can contain.

Project: My work has been concentrating around and inside of string installations, and the sound that tightening such structures create. This obsessive, breathing­like sound facinates me because of its ability to bring both the installation and its enviroment to life in a different way. Örö’s historical background and its distinctive natural environment provides an interesting surrounding for me to take this ongoing practice based research further.

Website: ainomantynen.blogspot.fi

Elina Juopperi (FIN)

Elina Juopperi’s childhood landscape is the barren fjelds of Lapland from where she went on to study art at France ENSAPC. Her divided life between urban metropols and the forests of Lapland can be seen in her works: The duality of nature and culture. Most of her works are based on documentary style; she likes to point on things, to reveal, to provoke thoughts.

Website: pykeijanpallo.blogspot.fi

Ruth Olden (UK)

I’m a creative researcher/practitioner currently engaged in a PhD in human geography at the University of Glasgow and teaching on the Learning to Land MA course at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Formerly a practicing Landscape Architect and freelance writer for the Landscape Institute magazine Landscape, I moved into geographical research to further explore the ‘mess’ of human-disturbed landscapes and their possible futures through creative and collaborative fieldwork, the lost art of description, and experiments with the imaginary.

Where are the resources for hope on human-disturbed landscapes? What kinds of experimental, opportunist and creative methods/dispositions do we need to unearth them? And what sorts of ecological imaginaries might we begin to construct from them? These are questions I would like to explore on Örö by writing a memoir of the island which weaves together its human and natural histories. Resources for this memoir will be sought out through field-based observations which follow the life of the island’s disturbance ecologies, the legacy of its material memory and the possibilities of its unfamiliar alliances. By bringing together the voices of the island’s elemental, winged and human protagonists this memoir will deepen sensitivity to the many inter-species relationships that have made this island and use their insights to describe a hopeful ruin future.

Lilli Haapala (FIN)

Lilli Haapala lives ands works in Turku and Helsinki, Finland. She has studied her BA in fine arts in Turku Arts academy. At this time she is studying her MA in fine arts, Time and space department in Finnish Academy of fine arts, Helsinki.

Haapala explores in her art wildlife, plants and veriety of ecosystems. In her art the Finnish nature mythology and different sciences debates to each other about many questions of our existence. She is working with installations, photography, bioart and performances.

Website: www.lillihaapala.com

Camilla Edström Ödemark (SWE)

Edström Ödemark holds a BFA from Konstfack, 2014, and has recently had her works shown at Cirkulationscentralen (SE), Spriten Kunsthall (NO), Third Space Gallery (FIN), Mångkulturellt center (SE) and Free Art Space (FIN). Together with artist Anna Ihle she curated the shows Heavenly Orders no.1 and no.3 at Spriten Kunsthall in 2015, including works by Nicole Levaque (CA), Jaakko Pallasvuo (FIN), Anders Moss (NO) and Henna Hyvärinen (FIN).

Working mainly with video and installations, Edström Ödemark’s artistic practice deals with how power structures and hierarchies are established and maintained in a national and eurocentric consciousness. She makes use of analogies, metaphors and associative symbols to create a narrative, where historic events, myths and popular culture are re-arranged to create a new understanding of colonialism and whiteness. At Örö she will write a video essay, which through the esthetics and language of sci-fi movies will analyze how colonialism still affects white Western identity.

Website: www.edstromodemark.com

Rob StJohn (UK)

Rob is a writer, artist and academic based in West Yorkshire, UK. His work includes landscape writing, art-science collaboration and sound art and has been collected in numerous publications, exhibitions, installations and releases. Rob is a PhD researcher in cultural geography at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, focusing on interdisciplinary overlaps between artists, scientists and geographers in the Anthropocene.

Rob plans to use the Impilinna house as an ‘experimental geography’ field station: a base from which to explore the island and a space which fosters interdisciplinary collaboration. His approach will frame the island landscape as an active archive of stories, structures and objects, and draw techniques from visual and sonic art and geography in a process of creative c(art)ography.

Website: robstjohn.co.uk

Pirkko Holmberg (FIN)

I have graduated as a MA in aesthetics in 2011 and worked with many aspects of cultural life: as an art critic, in galleries and lately as a translator of classical philosophical texts. In 2014 I started as a PhD student in philosophy at Jyväskylä university. The subject of my study is the view on perception as presented in J.W. von Goethes studies of colour.Currently I am  working on a Finnish translation of J.W. von Goethe’s Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre, 1808-10), which will be published approximately 2017 by Teos. Goethe’s descriptions of his colour studies pose many challenges for the translator, which the island’s atmosphere may help to overcome.

Hanna Nielsen & Said Afifi

Hanna Nielsen currently works and lives in Dalarna, Sweden. With an interest of communication through objects, combined with questions of existence, relations, public spaces and worldview and a passion for making, Hanna is working with body related objects, video and photography.

Said Afifi currently lives and works in Morocco. Playing with the post-modern codes of architecture pushed to their paroxysm, the works of Said Afifi are read as many utopic projects that announce the coming of an apocalyptic era where concrete rules as the king. Whether it be in his interactive installations, photographic or video work, the work is developed from a cold and perfectly clean aesthetic. www.said.afifi.blogspot.com

During the residence at Örö we will develop a collaborative project, <<BODY BUILDINGS>>. The project is a imaginary vision of the area of today and tomorrow, and how effectively, architecture and natural spaces can transform our behavior and the way we communicate, conceive and understand the world around us.

Websites: www.hannanielsen.com & said-afifi.blogspot.com