Extractions III: CoLab
A collaborative fieldwork and exhibition project, 2025
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.
In 2025, CoLab unfolds in the forests surrounding the Fen Complex in Telemark, Norway, an area marked by proposals for rare earth mining and geopolitical interest. Here, the project engages with the forest as more than backdrop: a living archive, a vulnerable ecology, and a site of contested futures.
The project culminates in an exhibition and catalogue, presenting both the artistic outcomes and the traces of process: fragments, sketches, soil, sound, conversation. As with earlier Extractions works, it resists resolution, offering instead a collection of voices, gestures, and field-based imaginaries that that confront the overlapping pressures of ecology, economy, and time.
Field Weekend - Alternative Landscape Mapping
Lønntjenn/Bærevann, Norway. August 8-10, 2025. A three-day artistic and interdisciplinary gathering at the edge of a threatened forest
Artists, researchers, landowners, and invited guests came together to explore, listen, and document this place using methods that go beyond measurement and data. Our basecamp served as a poetic and practical anchor; field investigations unfolded through drawing, sound, mapping, conversation, video, and performative interventions. This project approaches the landscape as both a physical place and a political ecology, layered with history, memory, and sensory experience.
Program Highlights
Friday: Arrival, introductions, and evening conversation: “How to map what cannot be counted?//What is the role of art here?” Musical performance.
Saturday: Independent fieldwork and guided walks, lunch with group dialogue and sharing works-in-progress in basecamp. Evening: free time / small interventions in the landscape.
Sunday: Independent fieldwork. Open basecamp (invited guests) with presentations, performance, and conversations. Mini-lecture On the Volcano, followed by performance Til orientering (For Your Information), and Metal Meets Wood. Closing conversation & departure
Methods & Approach
- Sensory mapping: drawing, listening, walking
- Document-based and participatory performance
- Video and photographic studies
- Conversations as method
- Process-first: no requirement to complete works on site
Participants & Contributors
Linn Obrestad
Artist, filmmaker, artistic researcher and educator with a background in art, biotechnology, and social anthropology. Educated at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, the University of Oslo, and the University of South-Eastern Norway. Obrestad works with poetic documentaries, experimental video, text, and installations, exploring how we sense, map, and interpret ecological and social landscapes.
Hilde Iren Dølheim
Visual artist educated at Glasgow School of Art and Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. Dølheim works with spatial installations where text, photography, and objects merge into condensed expressions addressing relationships, the environment, and impermanence.
Emma Arnold
Interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and writer, originally from Montréal, now based in Oslo. She works with creative and democratic approaches to urban and community development, with a particular focus on environmental issues and the climate crisis. Arnold holds a PhD in urban geography from the University of Oslo and leads the interdisciplinary research platform The Institute for Art & Environment.
Per Tore Iversen
Member of the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature (Naturvernforbundet) and the national mining committee. MSc in Gestalt Therapy from the University of Derby. Lives in Bø with his family and is a dedicated year-round outdoor enthusiast.
Per Ingvar Haukeland
Philosopher and author with a PhD in pedagogy and philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley. Active in the deep ecology movement since the late 1980s. Focused on naturnærvær (nature presence), an approach to re-establishing connections with nature through knowledge, skills, and values.
Maj-Gret Gaupås
Visual artist based in Skien and chair of the Artists’ Association of Telemark. Works mainly with painting. Gaupås studied at Turps Studio Program in London and holds a master’s degree in literature from the University of Oslo.
Stine Gonsholt
Filmmaker and visual artist based in Skien. Educated at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design and the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik. Her projects often originate from specific places and investigate how global processes impact local communities, identity, and landscapes through video, photography, and text-based installations.
Tom Løberg
Author and artist based in Porsgrunn. Works mainly with video, photography, and collage in various materials. He was for many years involved in the interdisciplinary art project Greenlight, serving as project leader and contributing to foundational texts on local industrial history, aesthetics, and ecological theory.
Damae Jannette Jongkind
Musician and educator with degrees in music and English education from the University of Victoria (Canada), HKU Utrecht, and HU Utrecht (Netherlands). Originally from Canada, now living at the old Svenseid Station in Nome. She plays and sings for her own and others’ enjoyment, performing regularly with Svenseid Station Jam, a group blending folk, trad-jazz, and improvisation. She is a double bassist, vocalist, brass player, arranger, and active participant in the local music community.
Sylvelin Hege Sevilhaug
Engineer, educator, and musician with a background in cognitive musicology, jazz improvisation, and folk music. Educated at NTNU, USN, and UiO. Former teacher and project leader in research and technology development, now working with music activities and escape games. Passionate about creativity in learning and the importance of nature, music, and art for quality of life and health. Originally from Lom, now living on a smallholding outside Helgeroa.
Complexity-Sensitive Artivism
We work through a practice guided by our Complexity-Sensitive Artivism manifesto, a quiet framework for resisting simplification, cultivating attention, and sensing otherwise. It calls for presence over spectacle, fidelity to place, and art as infrastructure for care, grief, and possibility.
From the manifesto:
Resistance is not always loud. Attention is a form of activism. Care is political.
We propose a field of inquiry and co-sensing where the world is not a backdrop for slogans, but a living collaborator in how we know, feel, and respond.
Ours is a quiet that resonates, rooted, durational, and careful.
We stay with the trouble.
We refuse to simplify.
We expand the field.
We listen.
We stay.
