Ways of knowing – Filming With the Ocean

The seminar “Filming with the Ocean” is part of the seminar series “Ways of knowing Spring 2025” where we every Wednesday this Spring is exploring how Ways of Knowing is manifesting in the field of artistic research right now. Read more about the seminar series and find upcoming seminars.

One of cinema’s greatest powers is its animism. On the screen there is no still life. Objects have attitudes. Trees gesture. Mountains, like this Etna, signify. Each element of staging becomes a character. Jean Epstein, “Cinema Seen from Etna” 1926.

Through lecture, screening and joint discussion, the artist Kajsa Dahlberg will present her PhD project from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm called Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images (2024). Her research comes out of an urge to think about film and image-making practices from the perspective of uncertain futures – futures defined by climate change and political unrest. Dahlberg asks how the climate crisis demands us to reconsider our (human) position in this world, and further, how does it affect (or not) our use of technology?

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Informed by queer life practices, theories, and affinities, Dahlbergs projects draw from new materialist and post-humanist discourse in order to investigate how non-human life forms are part of and shape (our human) visual culture. As an example, she has engaged in the historical connections between seaweed and photography in order to challenge perceptions of visual technology as one-sidedly linked to modes of human representation. Instead, Dahlberg shows how the medium of film bears witnesses to material interdependencies with potential to bring together, rather than separate, human and non-human realms.

“Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images” considers the cinematic space of the ocean alongside Jean Epstein’s film "Le Tempestaire" (1947); it follows early photographic chemical methods involving seaweed to both develop film and to examine the technical intra-activity of human and nonhuman regimes as part of photography itself. Within the scope of this research, Dahlberg wishes to argue that film engages in a sensory and reciprocal involvement with the material world, one that addresses the ability to sense, not just with one’s eyes, but with the entire body.

Bio

Kajsa Dahlberg (b.1973 in Gothenburg) is a visual artist living in Oslo. She received her MFA at the Art Academy in Malmö 1998-2003 and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program in New York in 2007-08. Dahlberg’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Parra & Romero in Madrid, and Lunds Konsthall. Her contributions to museums and biennials include works for Moderna Museet Stockholm, Malmö Art Museum, 8 Bienal do Mercosul, Manifesta 8, and GIBCA 2019. In the spring of 2024, Dahlberg finished her PhD Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images, from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.