Meet the Artist
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Lise Autogena participated to Resonances III together with Joshua Portway, her collaborator since the early 1990s, developing large-scale multimedia installations, site-specific works and performances. They use video, new technologies and large-scale data visualisations of global real-time data, to explore what impact human-made social, geographic and economic systems have on our human experience.
Resonances III Project
Weather Prediction By Numerical Process
Weather Prediction By Numerical Process is a participatory performance for Resonances III Festival where people calculate collaboratively a weather forecast through human labour, thus turning the act of calculating the computation into a social action. It is a tribute to the heroic effort of Lewis Fry Richardson, a pacifist Quaker who spent his time as a medic during World War I, calculating the first numerical weather forecast by hand. Working before the days of electronic computers, he had the utopian dream that the nations of the world would come together to create a vast “human computer” consisting of tens of thousands of mathematicians who would work around the clock to calculate the weather for the good of all humankind.
A collaboration between Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway, Jutta Thielen-del Pozo, Florian Pappenberger (ECMWF), and Peter Lynch (School of Mathematics and Statistics, University College Dublin) as advisor.
Participation to the Public Participation and Deliberative Democracy Festival (continued collaboration with JRC)
On Thursday 20th October, Lise Autogena returned to the JRC site in Ispra to speak at the 4th Public Participation and Deliberative Democracy Festival.
In conversation with SciArt project leader, Adriaan Eeckels, she briefly outlined her work Weather Prediction By Numerical Process for Resonances III together with Joshua Portway - and the wish to recreate Lewis Fry Richardson's calculation of forecast by hand with a mass participative performance. Then she discussed her recent work in Greenland with Joshua Portway, developing an archive of the Kuannarsuit / Kvanefjeld mountain and local people's feelings towards it.
Having set up the The Narsaq International Research Station in Greenland, she focused on the Kuannarsuit/Kvanefjeld plateu in South Greenland, together with Joshua Portway. Thought to contain the world's second-largest deposit of rare-earth oxides, sixth-largest deposit of uranium and one of the largest multi-element deposits of its kind in the world, this mountain has become the epicentre for a democratic discussion about Greenland’s future. She dug into some of the core issues facing the community of Greenland, such as the lack of roads to connect with and the inability to communicate about Greenland's trauma due to the lack of common language between the people, which seriously challenge the assertion of the country's identity.
In the session she presented her web-archive that refracted the different facets, local perceptions and decision-making around the plans for the mining of Kvanefjeld. As she collected her sources, she had had people open up to her about their experiences for the first time. Conveyed through fragments of interviews, children's toys, impacts from melting glaciers, radiation monitoring of polar bears, radioactive rocks, tweets from the US president and traditional knowledge - the archive is a project which gives voice to the people of Greenland. Lise is hoping to take the project further connect and empower local communities using art. This was a mind-opening session on the deep potential of art at a local, community level, especially with regards to healing identities which have been torn apart by colonialism and environmental disruption.
Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld is an art installation, video documentary and evolving online archive which examines the divisive issue of uranium mining in Greenland; the difficult decisions and trade-offs faced by an indigenous culture seeking to escape a colonial past to define its own identity in a globalised world. It explores the conflicting issues of progress, inclusive and informed decision-making and the vast unknown consequences of siting a uranium mine right next to a town in Greenland’s only agricultural region.The Kvanefjeld mountain contains one of the largest deposits of uranium and rare earth minerals on earth, sited in a UNESCO protected landscape, surrounded by spectacular ice fjords and sheep grazing country. Yet for many Greenlanders the exploitation of Greenland’s uranium and mineral reserves is the only route to an independent, de-colonised future. The Kvanefjeld mine has come to symbolise a pivotal moment for Greenland, where short-term foreign mining investments could radically impact on the economic, social and cultural fabric and identity of Greenlanders and jeopardize the dream of a long-term sustainable future.
Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld was developed in collaboration with Joshua Portway and commissioned by Ele Carpenter, Arts Catalyst and Bildmuseet for Nuclear Culture, to explore how contemporary art can inform a wider international debate on nuclear issues. It was commissioned for “Perpetual Uncertainty - Contemporary Art in the Nuclear Anthropocene”, Bildmuseet, Sweden in 2016, and was subsequently presented, exhibited and screened worldwide in museums, film festivals and conferences, including nuclear safety and nuclear colonialism conferences. It toured with the International Uranium Film Festival to Navajo Indian uranium mining disaster sites.
Lise set up the Narsaq International Research Station, an independent research platform with a focus on cultural and scientific research in South Greenland. The Research Station is located in an area of outstanding natural beauty and cultural heritage, in a region that is central for understanding some of the most urgent challenges the world is facing today.
The research station supports research in the sciences, humanities and arts on a global and a local scale, and promotes Greenland’s geopolitical role. It endorses art-science initiatives that work on ecology, the environment, e-waste and democratic processes, with a specific focus on the Narsaq region. The Research Station participates in cooperation agreements with cultural and research institutions in Greenland and the rest of the world. At the moment they have plans to continue environment-related conversations with climate researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute; as well as research into food production and distribution, waste handling, and recycling in South Greenland; and on the connections between business, education and policy making.
It's a fascinating project worth checking out!
Participation to the Curating matters of care in the Arctic Workshop (continued collaboration with JRC)
On 26/05/2023 Lise returned to the JRC to showcase her installation, Kuannarsuit/Kvanefjeld, at the Curating matters of care in the Arctic Workshop organised by the Public Participation and Deliberative Democracy Team @ JRC together with ARCTIC PASSION.
This workshop focused on dilemmas (or multi-lemmas), on matters of care and on wisdoms, as lenses to help the participants with looking closer at what the needs are across different communities to advance issues related to working across different knowledge production systems. It involved in deeper ways the arts, and in particular the arts of Saami or arts related to the Arctic.
The workshop also reflected on the meanings of these discussions for governance in the Arctic and in particular for EU research policy and EU funded research projects. It also reflected on the need to set up a “community of practice” on these topics of interest.
(This was a closed workshop, open only to those with prior registration).