First exhibited 2022 at Krognoshuset, Sweden.
Installations:
Perennial Dinner / Heritage Cabbage
Sensory World Game (interactive)
Staff wellness
This text is about the exhibition - when it is over

My body is dreaming. Of Perennial Cabbage. Green Kale. Napa. Standing tall, dense with nutrition. Thick leaves, glistening snow on top. Yellow flowers and tiny, dark seeds in brittle shells. I place a few seeds in small pots with moist compost in March. Transplant the small sprouts into bigger pots when two chubby leaves are showing. We eat bitter, finely chopped leaves in the summer. Survive on frost bitten, sweet vitamin-C rich stews in winter. We make kimchi. I recolonise my gut microbiome with growth and care. I love you, Brassicaceae.
Sprinkle salt and bake in the oven to crispy chips. Use instead of spinach. Chop. Cook.

WHAT DO ARTISTS DO IN A CLIMATE CRISIS?
I started my quest of saving the world in the 1980´s zeitgeist of Greenpeace and VHS videos in school of baby seals being skinned. My friend and I would stand at the local supermarket and freeze with her dog, collecting money for endangered species and the WWF. We would get tired halfway and end up buying cakes for half of it. When I look back, I do see these halfway breaks as a form of very important self care. Activism is hard work. Burnout is inevitable.

When I had my first son and finally woke up from the collective art-career-psychosis, I realised, that I had grown tired of working with art the way I did. It did not correlate with my values. Breaking my body and health on demands for spectacular projects, that forced all my creative energy into production, pitching my project over and over again until all passion had fizzled away, spending more than I earned on storing installations. Travelling all the time and saying goodnight to my kid on the phone. Driving my artworks to the landfill and watch all my thinking basically being burned.

It could be a beautiful analogy for the artwork as a sand mandala; there for a moment, swept away. Except it wasn’t at all.
I moved out of Copenhagen to Roskilde with my family and the next years I spend insatiably getting to know everything about plants and permaculture. As the founder Bill Mollison coined the permaculture core values: Earth care, People care, Fair share; it wasn’t such a stretch from my feminist, postcolonial, antiracist, left-wing, anti-speciesism, activist beliefs. Just immensely different approaches and schooling. I kept asking myself: where does the outcome of artistic creation belong on the sliding scale between being a consumer and being constructive?

In our household we sort our trash, eat plants instead of meat, save up for an electrical car. But one unanswered question keeps bugging me: what do artists do in a climate crisis? When we look at facts, the world is well beyond the sustainability issue. Greenwashing aside, we need to regenerate and rebuild resources on every level and our profession needs to take action too. Poisonous materials, luxury market objects? Goodbye. Artworks and exhibitions with ethical labelling? Hello!

Jette Hye Jin Mortensen´s Three Pocket Philosophy Rules for Healthy Artmaking
1. Work with materials that feel alive in your hands.
2. Create things that has a purpose in this world.
3. Create something that keeps you excited

I began to see the upperclass aesthetics everywhere as the status competitions they are. Mining the Earth for precious metals, whipping nature into cut grass landscapes with no biodiversity. Artists spending their whole lives painting, sewing and building extravagant backdrops for the few. My adoptee grandparents were poor, but self sufficient farmers; every Christmas they wished for a single silver fork or spoon, so that they one day could collect a full dining set for their wedding. Like the royals. Just to lurk in dark drawers and at antique markets today. Now, 36% of all CO2 output comes from food production, transport and waste; at the same time, two generations have forgotten how to grow their own food. We consume endlessly in a maze of decadent culture, fear of rejection and hollow talk. Seven years ago, I quit the art world, but I still make art.

My practice has become more seasonal. More holistic, local and permanent. Every plant I grow for my kitchen is one freelance job less. And one more habitat for butterflies. I have multiple frustrating trial and errors. Have become a certified pemaculture designer. Kept to myself to keep it real. Made new friends, new ideas and finally designed my dreamjob on the border between art, science and permaculture. One tool I use is IKIGAI; a japanese life-work concept. I used to be way off the center. Were do you see yourself right now?

ECOLABELLED!
Let´s try this. Earth care, People care and Fair share were used thoughout the production of this exhibition. I fundraised when my idea was ripe, got money for two months of work and tried to limit myself to this, mentally and physically. No new materials that cannot be composted, grown or 100% recycled. No new plastic or concrete. Existing art installations and upcycled materials were taken out of storage and used, rainwater, old silverware, personal houseware, used bedlinen, clay, perennial cabbage seeds, beans, paper, wool, reused pleather, silk, linen, Krognoshuset´s tables and eco print. And for the first time in many years, I plan to have a good time while installing! You are all invited to dinner: please take home a few cabbage seeds and grow them. Work less and do meaningful things. Discover natural abundance and take halfway cake breaks with your friends.