Extractions Forward (2025-)

Extractions Forward is an ongoing Norway/Brazil collaboration exploring the cultural and ecological consequences of rare earth mining. Rooted in a threatened forest at Fensfeltet in Telemark, and expanding into Minas Gerais, Brazil, the project connects two extractive frontiers that reveal the paradox of the so called green transition. Together with international partners, Obrestad/Dølheim build on and develop methods of complexity-sensitive artivism: alternative ecological surveys, text interventions, films, and living archives that bring together artistic practice, science, and local and indigenous knowledge. The work creates infrastructures of attention, care, and presence: quiet forms of resistance that invite multiple ways of knowing to coexist.

Extractions CoLab
A collaborative fieldwork and exhibition project, 2025/2026

The third installment in Obrestad/Dølheim´s Extractions series, CoLab brings together artists, researchers, and local participants for an immersive investigation into landscapes under pressure from extraction, industrial transformation, and ecological disruption. This collaborative project explores how artistic fieldwork can become a space of resistance, care, and alternative knowledge-making,  where attention, gesture, and dialogue form a counter-cartography to dominant narratives of progress.

EcoEchos Film festival, 2026

EcoEchos is a film art project and screening platform initiated by Linn Obrestad and Hilde Iren Dølheim in collaboration with Brazilian artist and curator Michelle Sales. Through screenings, masterclasses, and site-specific visual interventions, we explore how environmental disaster,  ecological crisis and landscape are experienced and communicated in film through the eyes of different artists. The first screening will take place in Skien, Norway, in January 2026, followed by a parallel program in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil later that year. This project is part of an ongoing body of work and contributes to a larger effort to develop methodologies for artistic collaboration, knowledge exchange, and ecocritical dissemination across contexts, with an emphasis on experience-sharing, slow response, and place-sensitivity.

For Your Information Document-based participatory performance 2025, (Obrestad/Dølheim)

A table, a document, words you already know.
Something is to be reviewed, but it has already been decided. Terminology is delivered with appropriate gravity, though no understanding is required. Definitions are offered. Consequences are mentioned in passing. This is not a discussion. It is a briefing.

And all actions proceed in accordance with established procedure.

Complexity-Sensitive Artivism Manifesto, 2025 (Obrestad/Dølheim)

A manifesto is often imagined as a shout. Ours is a listening device. We treat the manifesto as an art form, a scaffold for attention, not as megaphone. It doesn’t aim to win the last word, but to make room for the next relation. To become an instrument for noticing and for staying with what resists simplification. In that sense, the form and the politics align: attention is activism, care is strategic, the task is not to narrow the argument but to expand the field.

Quiet does not mean passive // Resistance is not only opposition.

Guiding principle:

Don’t simplify the conflict, expand the field.

Masterclass, Festival of Knowledge UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 2025

Silent Knowledge, Resonant Futures: Artivism and Alternative Data from a Norwegian Forest

In this masterclass, Linn Obrestad and Hilde Iren Dølheim engage with ecological crisis through a quiet, context-rich approach to artivism. Rather than overt protest, their method involves deep collaboration, alternative cartographies, and storytelling rooted in lived geographies. Conducted at the Festival of Knowledge UFRJ 2025, the session explores how experiences and methods from Norway might resonate with, and be adapted to, the Amazonian context, bridging biomes through care, attention, and a refusal to simplify.