The Centre for Intercultural Studies (CEI) invites the academic community to attend the Masterclass of the MA in Intercultural Studies “Ocean Connections: reflecting on a transdisciplinary art project employing eco-aesthetic perspectives” by Kristin Bergaust (OsloMet University, Norway), that will take place on June 8th, at 6:30 PM, room 230 at ISCAP- P.PORTO. Attendance is free.
From our position as humans, we can make use of artistic, cultural and technological practices to discover what is not sensuously attainable to us in our environment.
Ocean Connections, a two-channel video installation in collaboration with scientists Guillermo Garcia-Sanchez and Evangelos Voukouvalas, utilizes mathematical modelling of ocean movements through the water body and the historical development of biodiversity in the Oslofjord along with stories of depositories and microorganisms.
Western art history and visual culture often represent nature from an anthropocentric viewpoint. Examples can be renaissance construction of perspective based on the human eyesight and symbolic renderings of natural phenomena as representations of human emotions, prevalent in romanticism and throughout modernism. Inspired by feminist film theory pointing to a certain ideology of representation (Mulvey 1975), I seek a perspective that gives credit to environmental characteristics. Visual and aural technology that do not mimic human senses such as modelling, microscopy, radiology, medical imaging techniques, and 360 photo and video. Indigenous and agricultural traditions and knowledges might be employed as well. Combining these experimental methods lets imagination and fantasy be in play as much as science.
Looking at a process rather than a photographed moment, or a course of events through measuring and modelling, might lead to different perceptions of the environment. Rather than depicting a crucial moment, we try to give life and meaning to processes, some not visible to us, some so slow they escape human perception. Ocean Connections is an attempt to create immersive experiences of the ocean, full of life but also threatened by dire environmental crises and ecocide.
About Kristin Bergaust:
Kristin Bergaust is an artist, researcher and curating organizer, the vice-dean of research and professor of contemporary art at the Faculty of Technology, Art and Design in OsloMet, in Oslo, Norway.
She investigates current conditions through feminist and transcultural perspectives, fed by cultural history, scientific data and other narratives while employing artistic, performative, and technological practices. This is visible in her curatorial and artistic project Oslofjord Ecologies for Creative Europe from 2016. In the collective curatorial and artistic endeavor Oslofjord Triennial, the engagement for the Oslofjord were put to curatorial practice on an off-grid island Lågøya in August 2024 and continues with an aim to build up to another edition in the central Oslo harbour area in 2027.
Commissioned by the SciArt project NaturArchy of JRC-European Community, Kristin developed Ocean Connections (2022-24) with scientists Guillermo García Sanchéz and Evangelos Voukouvalas. The resulting video installation looks at the Oslofjord as a subjective protagonist and a carrier of scientific data, but most of all as a portrait of a natural water body and its forces. In 2025 this practice was followed by the River of Many Names looking at the Danube river as it appears in Southern Romania, in the context of Eco-cultural tides, Submerged narratives of the Danube and Oslo Fjord curated by Mirela Vladuti of Meta Spatiu in Timisoara (RO).