FIELD ASSEMBLEY at the planned REE mining site of Per Geijer, Kiruna (2027)
A collaboration between ARNEN (DK) and EXTRACTIONS (NO)
In development, proposed 2027
The initiative explores rare earths mining in the Nordic region.
ARNEN (DK) is an established artist/academic network, and EXTRACTIONS (NO) a longstanding artistic situated practice, working with extractive fields. Both groups have previously conducted field work, in Sulitjelma and Fensfeltet respectively. Our method engages with contested sited and conflicting interests through art
The proposed Field Assembly will bring us together to exchange experiences and explore shared questions.
With:
Honey Biba Beckerlee , artist, Copenhagen, DK
Nanna Elvin Hansen, artist, Copenhagen , DK
Runa Johannessen, researcher, Copenhagen, DK
Linn Obrestad, artist, Telemark, NO
Hilde Iren Dølheim, artist, Telemark, NO
Geological Confidence (2026-)
Multi-screen essay film / installation, in development
A field-based filmwork about Fensfeltet / the Fen Complex in Norway, developed in dialogue with other extraction landscapes , investigating what happens to a place when the ground beneath it is renamed a deposit. The title comes from the language of mineral assessment, geological confidence is the technical measure of how certain an industry is about what lies beneath the surface. The film works beside and against that certainty, staying close to what such measurement cannot see or include.
At Fensfeltet, a proposed rare earth mining development is reshaping how forests, wetlands, paths, water systems, and seasonal rhythms are described and valued.
Made through durational fieldwork, local conversations, scientific and ecological research, and complexity-sensitive artivism, the project will exist as both a continuous essay film and a multi-channel installation. It grows from the wider Extractions body of work, including the films Ode to Invisible, Silva Incognita, Potential, and No Significant Impact, as well as CoLab fieldwork, public presentations, and the film and art festival EcoEchos.
Geological Confidence is currently in active development. The next phase includes continued fieldwork, technical development and post-production toward a fuller multi-site film installation.
Budo Girls (2009–)
Experimental documentary feature, in production
In 2009, I began filming four girls in their final year at King's College Budo, a boarding school in Kampala, Uganda. I haven't stopped.
Petua, Marion, Lavendah, and Esther were teenagers when filming began. They are in their mid-thirties now. In the intervening years they have moved between Uganda, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States, through university, first jobs, professional lives, marriages, a global pandemic, and a world that has changed considerably around them. I have followed them, unevenly and honestly, across almost two decades.
Budo Girls is a film about four specific people, and about what happens to people over time, to their plans, their contradictions, their ideas about who they were going to be. It works in the space between who the world expects them to be and who they are actually becoming.
Formally, the film sits at the intersection of observational documentary, essay film, and experimental practice. The footage, handheld, immediate, accumulated across fifteen years, is not smoothed into narrative coherence, but treated as evidence of time passing in real bodies, real rooms, real conversations. The film is interested in what sustained attention to specific human lives can produce that other forms of representation cannot.
Budo Girls is currently in active development toward a final edit. New material is being filmed in 2027.
