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 extraction landscapes and artistic collaborators in Australia and Brazil, 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, include, or hold.
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 Norway/Brazil film and art festival EcoEchos.
Geological Confidence is currently in active development. The next phase includes continued fieldwork in Norway, a planned field phase in Brazil and Australia, technical development and post-production toward a fuller multi-site film installation.
Upcoming exhibition: Extractions: Fensfeltet
Galleri Kunstparken, Risør, 12 Sept – 11 Oct 2026
An exhibition and catalogue presenting the artistic outcomes of Extractions CoLab 2025, with works by Obrestad/Dølheim, Stine Gonsholt, Tom Løberg, Emma Arnold, and Maj Gret Gaupås. As with earlier Extractions works, the exhibition offers a collection of voices, gestures, and field-based imaginaries that confront the overlapping pressures of ecology, economy, and time.
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.
Extractions Forward Norway/Brazil collaboration (2025- )
Ongoing Norway/Brazil collaboration exploring the cultural and ecological consequences of extractions. Starting in a forest area 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. See Extractions
