Information
Potatoes' Perspective is an enquiry initiated by artist, re-searcher, writer and organiser Åsa Sonjasdotter, living by the island of Ven in Sweden and the city of Berlin in Germany.
In her practice, Sonjasdotter engages in processes of rememberance and renarration of livelihood relations. By the cultivation of outlawed crops and close reading of archived matter (dead and alive), lost imagination and knowledge of the past and the present is brought into re-existence.
Sonjasdotter’s ongoing artistic enquiry, Cultivating Stories, follows the re-cultivation of grains rescued from the deep freezers of the Nordic Gene Bank. It is to be presented in a collaboration with the farmer/breeder-initiated association Allkorn, the People's Movements for Art Promotion (Konstfrämjandet), and Malmö Art Museum in Sweden, in 2022. Cultivating Stories was initially commissioned by the Bergen Assembly, Norway in 2019. It has been presented at the Biennale of Warsaw, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Württembergischen Kunstvereins, Stuttgart, and further venues.
Sonjasdotter is editor of the translation and contextualisation of the pamphlet Peace with the Earth (Fred med Jorden), written by Elisabeth Tamm and Elin Wägner in 1940, to be published by Archive Books, Berlin, in 2021, who also published her recent book Peace with the Earth, Tracing Agricultural Memory – Refiguring Practice in 2019. The book presents a micro-historical enquiry into agricultural practices departuring by the nurturing environments of the three staple crops grains, potatoes and kales.
Sonjasdotter is a Doctoral Researcher in Artistic Practice at Valand Academy, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2015, she is a founding member of the Neighbourhood Academy, a bottom up learning site growing from the Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin. In 2007, Sonjasdotter co-founded the Academy for Contemporary Art in Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway, where she was program leader until 2010, and professor until 2014. She took part in establishing the Danish artists’ association Young Art Workers (Unge kunstnere og kunstformidlere, UKK) in 2002. Sonjasdotter is a founding member of Women Down the Pub (Kvinder på Værtshus), a feminist action network initiated in Copenhagen, 1996, who published the antology View, feminist strategies in Danish visual art in 2004.
Contact: asa (at) potatoperspective.org
Further links:
www.asasonjasdotter.info