The Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence - Trajectories in Finland/Sweden
My dear friends Connor Cook, Malte Leander and myself (members of Trajectories, a collective of electroacoustic composers based out of Montréal and New Brunswick, Canada) are embarking on a 3-week sound art residency (Oct. 1-22, 2023) taking place on the Åland Archipelago, a cluster of islands in the middle of the Baltic Sea. We will be living on a remote island called Kökar in a little apartment equipped with studio room, beautiful nature, as well as the space and time to thoughtfully create. This goal of this residency is quite flexible and of our own design, allowing us to develop a schedule of activities balancing skill development, brainstorming, exploration, and creation. We’ll use field recorders, hydrophones, computer software, cameras, and projectors to document and process material collected along the shorelines of the island. It’s going to be A LOT of fun! As I write this I am already in Sweden on a train from Malmö to Stockholm where we will board one of 2 ferries that will take us to the island. We spent a few days in Malte’s hometown Malmö and birthplace Lund, communing with family, eating tasty food, buying deodorant, sourcing patch cables, and exploring this wonderful place.
Project Idea:
Our planned residency project is a practice-based exploration delving into the realm of soundscape/electroacoustic composition, with its genesis rooted in the island of Kökar's coastal ecologies. This undertaking will commence by immersing ourselves in the collection of audiovisual source materials from the island's shores. Through metamorphosis, enrichment, and reinterpretation, this repository of content shall be examined, leading to the initial stages of developing a prototype for a multimedia installation during the residency. Focusing the research and creative phases on Kökar facilitates an enriched connection to captivating, locally sourced material. The project's essence lies in challenging the reduction of the ocean to mere objectification and dismantling the illusion of disconnect between humans and the time-honored emergent ecologies. This is achieved by capturing remnants that serve as sensory echoes from the sea. Our objectives within the residency encompass amassing an extensive array of materials in both audio and video formats, crafting compositions that sculpt soundscapes from these recordings, devising a prototype motion sensor system for the anticipated installation, and immersing ourselves in reflections and dialogues regarding notions of conscious connections within nature.
The Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence
General information
The Åland Archipelago Guest Artist Residence in Kökar was created in 1997, first for an international artist exchange project with Ireland and Catalonia.
The residence program offers artists a chance to find inspiration from the nature and a great opportunity to develop their work.
The basic idea behind the creation of this residence is to experience a new surrounding for creative work. The residence also wishes to improve artists ability to pay attention to constructed natural environment and, eventually to find new ways for interaction between artists, society and environment.
The center is welcoming artists in:
Visual arts, literature, perform arts, design, research, crafts, art journalism, architecture, pottery, media art, photography, sound art.
Check out our Trajectories debut album Blood & Breath
For Trajectories, a Montreal-based compositional collective consisting of Connor Cook, Charles Harding, Malte Leander and Michael Pinsonneault, Blood & Breath represents the silver lining that came out of the global pandemic lockdowns of 2020-21 and their aftermath. Collaborating over Zoom and using shared drives, the group engaged with the unique circumstances and states of mind, body and emotion being personally and generally experienced in that historical moment, and the result was this album’s 10 tracks.
Source materials were personal and intimate: recordings of apartments and private journeys and spaces, made into communal, holographic fabric when shared and reinterpreted amongst all members. As the pandemic raged on, the context shifted and tilted. So too did the relationship change between artists and their compositions.