Photo: Spontaneous Deuce (Hannah & Shane), Beach BBQ and Harbour Pineapple 2017

Over the course of SKREI Convention project, three artistic residencies took take place in Norway, Portugal and Italy.  The artists, who work with different medium and practice were invited to take into consideration the cultural imaginaries of Arctic Cod as well as the social memory, the knowledge built around it.  The residency was a way to collect, explore and question people’s perception of Arctic Cod, functioning as an opportunity to instigate a process of critical reflection between people.

On the 11th of October 2019, all the artists selected for the residencies came together in Norway for an Artist Colloquium. Along with a selected group of museum and art practitioners and cultural institutions they discussed, presented and challenged their projects and the meaning of working between food, art and politics.

Read more about the ARTIST COLLOQUIUM HERE or scroll down to learn about the three different residencies.

Norway

spontaneous deuce

Spontaneous Deuce is an artist-couple working together since 2015. Their primary practice explores the nature of food and its relation to political, social, economic and environmental contexts. Alongside their adventures across the UK and Europe, they have begun a cidery project in Northern Ireland to produce Pétillant Naturel, using an ancestral method of winemaking. Their experiences and the people they met characterise their food-centred approaches to making art – ultimately focusing on what people choose to eat, drink, share and celebrate.

For SKREI Convention they developed a unique event, the Nessekonge’ dinner which took place at the Lofoten Museet. The artists took the audience through a journey in the museum, serving a menu comprising of regional salted and dried cod dishes, with the wish to highlight the legacy of the place and the cultivation of societies and settlements that were established primarily because of seasonal fishing. They shared their experience as the SKREI Convention’s “Artists in Residence”, and they encouraged thoughtful conversations and reflections about what we choose to eat, drink, share and celebrate!

ITALY

alessio trevisani

Dance Pedagogue, Choreographer and Germanist Alessio is the artistic director of the Freies Tanz Ensemble. With the Ensemble Alessio was selected as a finalist in Venice for the last edition of the Artelaguna Prize and won recently the competition for production in Italy at Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Lucca after a choreographic research residency. For the last 8 years, he has been working as choreographer and artistic director of the Company Leipziger Tanztheater, as well as the historic Tanzfabrik Dance Company. Alessio danced all over Europe before starting his own choreographic career.

The Body of Salt was a performance conceived for the Rialto Fish Market, in Venice, which took place in September 2019. It aims to re-imagine the historic trade routes of dried and salted codfish from the North of Norway to Venice. The water, the salt, the body (considered as an animal, human and divine) and the air (contained in a huge balloon) are the four elements on which the structure of the performance is built. These elements refer to the mutation of the matter if a living being is deprived of its natural habitat; they also open the space for a symbolic ritual based on the alchemical solution between salt and water, between the ancestral purification and scarification of the body. The Body of Salt was taken from Venice to Norway and shown in October 2019 during the SKREI Convention Conference days.

portugal

HECTOR ZAMORA

Héctor is a Mexican artist based in Lisbon that works in public spaces both indoors and outdoors. Zamora’s work questions the exhibition space by creating ephemeral site-specific artworks that involve viewers participation. In a hidden manner, his artistic practice reveals social, political and historical issues that are anchored to the sites chosen for his artwork. Both performative and plastic, Zamora’s body of works functions as a dialogue in which Art is an object as well as an event.

The Maritime Museum of Ílhavo has chosen the Mexican artist Hector Zamora to participate in the SKREI Convention artists residencies. Hector Zamora will produce a performance/installation using the architectural elements of the Museum to explore the traditional cod drying methods, the movements and rhythms of the work of the women, the songs that animated the daily life of a hard and intense process. 
The story began on board of the codfish ships, in the seas of Newfoundland and Labrador, and it was completed ashore with the dehydration of the codfish in the wind and sun.  The process took between three and eight weeks, and it was seasonal work, mostly done by women.