Grand Complications: (english/norwegian edition)

Collaborative Plants and Other Complications.

Andrea Bakketun (b. 1983 in Trondheim, Norway, lives and works in Oslo) and biologist Peter Roessingh invited people from the artist’s creative circle for the transdisciplinary project Grand Complications. For one year, the participants transformed the site of an old school building in Rommen, a suburb of Oslo, and the surrounding forest into a research laboratory with the aim of artistically penetrating all facets of the existing ecosystem. The resulting video works, performances, and site-specific installations are part of a canon of artistic research that expands scientific methods with the help of artistic means, recalling Paul Klee’s appeal that the goal of art is not to reproduce the visible, rather to make the invisible visible. Understood as a collective whole, Grand Complications observes and translates the activities of all those participating at the Rommen site - from the plant to the artist.

The publication documents the one-year work of Andrea Bakketun and her research participants. Accompanying texts, transcriptions, and poems were contributed by Hannah Mjolsnes, Peter Roessingh, Andreas Schlaegel, and Sara Solberg.