Marie Kølbæk Iversen will be PhD Research Fellow at Oslo Academy of Fine Arts, KHiO, and at School of Culture and Society (Anthropology), AU

Located at the intersection of visual art and anthropology, between modern and historical manifestations of Amazonian Pano shamanism and Southern Scandinavian Sejd, Marie’s artistic research project explores fright as transformative, future-led and other-directed potential

Project description:

Neo-worlds: the transformative potentialities of fright

My project focuses on future-led practices around fright on individual and cultural levels, and importantly does so from the point of view of knowledge forms that have been subjugated by value systems and power structures historically involved in perpetuating a culture of fear. Recovering and learning strategies to approximate fright, I argue, is crucial to confronting ‘ends of the world.’

As part of my artistic methodology I propose to reactivate fright-centered Hedebonde/Sejd rituality of Western Jutland in dialogue with a South American indigenous theory and the female shamans of the Pano Yawanawá tribe – themselves modern subjects, who have re-situated their cultural identity by critically appropriating fading ancestral knowledge. The visions born out of the syncretist field between Yawanawá and Sejd/Hedebonde rituality will inspire sci-fi ‘visionary artworks:’ films, drawings, pottery, tapestries. I call them sci-fi since they deal with (past,) future and alien technologies, cf. Ursula K. Le Guin’s definition of technology as "the active human interface with the material world," and because, following this definition, shamanist rituals might (also) be that: technologies.