On a blank sheet of paper, dark grey and blue traces of pencil converge and then
diverge, swimming freely to and fro, forming various organic shapes; the overall
composition seems either floral or vascular, amphibian or microbial. This is a
drawing that the Swedish artist duo Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn created, which depicts the magnetic fields of the places they frequent in their town. The aura of
each spot merges into a larger flowing cosmos that, to me, recalls Yggdrasil, the
central sacred tree in Norse cosmology. Landscape here becomes sentient and turns
into an interconnected space, a space among swamps, herbs, arthropods, between
cosmic meditation and spiritual sensibility.
The duo Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn are based in Hindås, a small town in the west of Sweden with only around 3,000 inhabitants, very far from the metropolises in which contemporary artists usually choose to live. For most urban people, the town must feel like a heterotopia in which time and space are different. “The days bleed together, and there is less distinction between your mind and the surroundings. Spending an extended period in the lake house feels like being in the film Solaris,” they say. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn moved to Hindås in 2014. Compared to an urban environment, it is a relatively peaceful place and they “have lost some of (their) city habits, like eating out or wearing clothes.” For them, forests and lakes are all one big studio for work, where they can immerse themselves, observe the ecosystem, and “make kin” with animals and plants. “Spending time in nature is conducive to this: your skin stroked by ferns, your calves intercepting an ant trail, the smell of wet soil filling every cell of your body.” Getting sweaty and taking a dip in the water before going home makes them feel born again. As partners in both work and life, the two seem to have maintained a rather stoic and ascetic lifestyle. They seldom use mobile phones, never buy new clothes, and thus, rarely have any anxiety caused by material desires. Although they have never quarreled over art, they admit that making art when there’s a deadline can be stressful. “Sometimes it feels like the seed for an artwork is implanted in us by some inter-dimensional entity that doesn’t care about our relationship or wellbeing. It just wants to be born. That can be rough.” When anxiety happens, luckily, it always helps for them to return to the basics: eating, sleeping, exercising, showering, and snuggling. Don’t get me wrong: neither “idiorrhythmic”1 (as Roland Barthes puts it) nor “pastoral” accurately describes the artist duo’s lifestyle, their daily routine’s deep interactions with living or non-living creatures, and their rich Nordic sensitivity to omnipresent spirits and souls. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn’s installations strike the beholder with their natural magnificence. They are often delicate mélanges of faunal, floral, and human elements that make up a single organic structure. Moon Bather (2018), for instance, uses sand, iron, blood, bone, feathers, glass, plaster, thistles, mushrooms, and beach debris to make a large, uncanny skeleton that lies tranquil and sublime, bathed in the moonlight like Endymion. In Dyn (2020), an amphibian bog priestess rises out of the murk to take her vengeance; her body is made of earth, rust, blood, copper, concrete, found moose bones, pine needles, hooks, lead sinkers, reflective tape, pigments, netting, waxed canvas, ferns, a sickle, wood, clay, and anchors.
The duo only use naturally dead animals or roadkill for artworks and try their best to honor the creatures. While the installations are surely (wo)man-made, the human traces are always kept very minimal. When those artificial components are present, they are mostly abandoned or decaying, deprived of their original function. For example, in 2019, Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn stumbled upon a half-finished amphitheater in Belgrade with a huge golden ohm sign collecting dust in a corner. The building had been abandoned and was populated by stray cats, small lizards, and green bottle flies. This was the site of Dit-Cilinn’s Lucilia, a performance in which she dresses up as a hexapod. “Being at the amphitheater felt like being born from dark dust, creeping and crawling while finding ways to evolve,” she says.
Perhaps there should never have been a boundary between humans and nature, or even between life and non-life. In Scandinavian mythology where cyclic time is a central theme, Líf (life) and Lífþrasir (zest for life) will survive doomsday by hiding in the woods and then repopulate a reborn world. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn present their own end-of-the-world scene in the installation Secret Song, a skeletal structure flanked by two high voltage isolators. The installation describes a world inhabited by humans, technology, lichens, insects, and demons, an extended ecology that includes the immaterial realm. The creature that emerged from the chrysalis feeds off the power grid: electricity is its nectar. In the duo’s view, spirit is not divorced from technology, and even prayer and ceremony can be seen as kinds of technology.
In my imagination, the works of Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn come from a near future when human activity on the planet will be vanishing, an epoch “undulating with slippery eros and gravid chaos,”2 in Donna Haraway’s words.
Yet, besides a de-anthropocentric vision of sympoiesis, Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn’s works are also dedicated to unabashed voluptuous pleasure. Sexuality and sensuality here are idiosyncratic, not the least bit related to penetrative intercourse or pornographic representation. Rather, experiencing their art is like going out naked on a summer evening by the riverside and having the body pervaded by streams of water. Looking closely at their work, there is often an erotic element: in the nipple pierced by a fishhook in Dyn, in the slithering bodies in Clearing the Clouds, and in the phallus dripping resin in Silken Sentience. They wish to hum with the background radiation that fills all space—the frequency that is strange, healing, and ferocious, the echo of the orgasm that sparked the universe. Indeed, the sexuality of plants, humans, and other animals is an expression of that same cosmic force.
Animistic ecstasy is, as Harry Martinson writes, “The firmament’s eternal mystery / and wondrous physics of the constellations / are law, but they are not the gospel truth. / Compassion flourishes at life’s foundations.”3
1 Barthes, R. (1977, 2012) How to Live Together. Translated from the French by Briggs, K. New York: Columbia University Press.
2 Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
3 Martinson, H. (1998) Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem. Translated from the Swedish by Klass, S. & Sjoberg, L. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press.
The duo Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn are based in Hindås, a small town in the west of Sweden with only around 3,000 inhabitants, very far from the metropolises in which contemporary artists usually choose to live. For most urban people, the town must feel like a heterotopia in which time and space are different. “The days bleed together, and there is less distinction between your mind and the surroundings. Spending an extended period in the lake house feels like being in the film Solaris,” they say. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn moved to Hindås in 2014. Compared to an urban environment, it is a relatively peaceful place and they “have lost some of (their) city habits, like eating out or wearing clothes.” For them, forests and lakes are all one big studio for work, where they can immerse themselves, observe the ecosystem, and “make kin” with animals and plants. “Spending time in nature is conducive to this: your skin stroked by ferns, your calves intercepting an ant trail, the smell of wet soil filling every cell of your body.” Getting sweaty and taking a dip in the water before going home makes them feel born again. As partners in both work and life, the two seem to have maintained a rather stoic and ascetic lifestyle. They seldom use mobile phones, never buy new clothes, and thus, rarely have any anxiety caused by material desires. Although they have never quarreled over art, they admit that making art when there’s a deadline can be stressful. “Sometimes it feels like the seed for an artwork is implanted in us by some inter-dimensional entity that doesn’t care about our relationship or wellbeing. It just wants to be born. That can be rough.” When anxiety happens, luckily, it always helps for them to return to the basics: eating, sleeping, exercising, showering, and snuggling. Don’t get me wrong: neither “idiorrhythmic”1 (as Roland Barthes puts it) nor “pastoral” accurately describes the artist duo’s lifestyle, their daily routine’s deep interactions with living or non-living creatures, and their rich Nordic sensitivity to omnipresent spirits and souls. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn’s installations strike the beholder with their natural magnificence. They are often delicate mélanges of faunal, floral, and human elements that make up a single organic structure. Moon Bather (2018), for instance, uses sand, iron, blood, bone, feathers, glass, plaster, thistles, mushrooms, and beach debris to make a large, uncanny skeleton that lies tranquil and sublime, bathed in the moonlight like Endymion. In Dyn (2020), an amphibian bog priestess rises out of the murk to take her vengeance; her body is made of earth, rust, blood, copper, concrete, found moose bones, pine needles, hooks, lead sinkers, reflective tape, pigments, netting, waxed canvas, ferns, a sickle, wood, clay, and anchors.
The duo only use naturally dead animals or roadkill for artworks and try their best to honor the creatures. While the installations are surely (wo)man-made, the human traces are always kept very minimal. When those artificial components are present, they are mostly abandoned or decaying, deprived of their original function. For example, in 2019, Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn stumbled upon a half-finished amphitheater in Belgrade with a huge golden ohm sign collecting dust in a corner. The building had been abandoned and was populated by stray cats, small lizards, and green bottle flies. This was the site of Dit-Cilinn’s Lucilia, a performance in which she dresses up as a hexapod. “Being at the amphitheater felt like being born from dark dust, creeping and crawling while finding ways to evolve,” she says.
Perhaps there should never have been a boundary between humans and nature, or even between life and non-life. In Scandinavian mythology where cyclic time is a central theme, Líf (life) and Lífþrasir (zest for life) will survive doomsday by hiding in the woods and then repopulate a reborn world. Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn present their own end-of-the-world scene in the installation Secret Song, a skeletal structure flanked by two high voltage isolators. The installation describes a world inhabited by humans, technology, lichens, insects, and demons, an extended ecology that includes the immaterial realm. The creature that emerged from the chrysalis feeds off the power grid: electricity is its nectar. In the duo’s view, spirit is not divorced from technology, and even prayer and ceremony can be seen as kinds of technology.
In my imagination, the works of Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn come from a near future when human activity on the planet will be vanishing, an epoch “undulating with slippery eros and gravid chaos,”2 in Donna Haraway’s words.
Yet, besides a de-anthropocentric vision of sympoiesis, Ohlsson/Dit-Cilinn’s works are also dedicated to unabashed voluptuous pleasure. Sexuality and sensuality here are idiosyncratic, not the least bit related to penetrative intercourse or pornographic representation. Rather, experiencing their art is like going out naked on a summer evening by the riverside and having the body pervaded by streams of water. Looking closely at their work, there is often an erotic element: in the nipple pierced by a fishhook in Dyn, in the slithering bodies in Clearing the Clouds, and in the phallus dripping resin in Silken Sentience. They wish to hum with the background radiation that fills all space—the frequency that is strange, healing, and ferocious, the echo of the orgasm that sparked the universe. Indeed, the sexuality of plants, humans, and other animals is an expression of that same cosmic force.
Animistic ecstasy is, as Harry Martinson writes, “The firmament’s eternal mystery / and wondrous physics of the constellations / are law, but they are not the gospel truth. / Compassion flourishes at life’s foundations.”3
1 Barthes, R. (1977, 2012) How to Live Together. Translated from the French by Briggs, K. New York: Columbia University Press.
2 Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
3 Martinson, H. (1998) Aniara: An Epic Science Fiction Poem. Translated from the Swedish by Klass, S. & Sjoberg, L. Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press.