Still image from Coenaesthesis – It Is Not Even True That There Is Air Between Us, Kajsa Dahlberg, 2023.

Within the group, one becomes conscious of one’s living and one’s thinking, and the impulses to live and to think that had come to a halt in personal life are concentrated there.

– Carla Lonzi, 1978

Sensations are relational, yet trauma and anxiety often enforce individualization and separation. For Italian feminist and art critic Carla Lonzi, it was within the collective conversation that one could find the impulse to think and to live. This is the space where we find forces to change what holds us back, personally as well as politically. High Sensitivity Media Group seeks to socialize the foreclosed histories and relations that haunt our sensuousness by the “contradictory, unresolved, open and expansive” aspect of mediation – to use M.E. O’Brien’s and Eman Abdelhadi’s way of describing oral histories. At this point in time, a historic moment of manifold crises, we feel the urge to get together at Astrid Noack’s Atelier in order to collectivize ungraspable and unexpressed sensations spanning anxiety and desire, and to collectively consider the ways in which we mediate these.

In a series of public sessions, we will explore media technologies such as film, audio recording and transcription processing crisis, trauma and desire. Just as we can do with our bodies, we can use these technologies to socialize histories, situations and experiences. We will practice scores for conversations in which expression and mediation are combined to create a situation in which something unexpected is to arise. We draw and build on practices and thoughts across histories, which emphasize the sensuous and historical aspect of social relations. O’Brien’s and Abdelhadi’s novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions 2022) imagines revolutionary futures through fictional oral histories. Their work links narratives of personal and collective trauma and healing to speculative accounts of social transformation. In Danish, dramaturg Ulla Ryum’s practice of non-linear storytelling makes space for the unexpected by inviting the viewer to search “around in the course of the story.”

High Sensitivity Media Group is initiated by visual artist and researcher Kajsa Dahlberg (SE/NO) and writer, art critic, and researcher Frida Sandström (SE/DK). The project is manifested in two parts at Astrid Noack’s Atelier during 2025-2026 and departs from Dahlberg’s research on film’s capacity to disrupt our preestablished modes of attention, and thereby to help us imagine something that is beyond what we think we can see; and Sandström’s writing practice and research in feminist consciousness-raising transcription practices in the era of sexual liberation in Italy in the late 1960s and early 1970s Italy. Moreover, the project draws on practices of organic psychodynamic group therapy, developed by Lisbeth W. Sørensen – an important source for the autonomous and queer milieu in Copenhagen for more than two decades. We see these methods illuminated today by a younger generation of therapists, artists, writers, and feminists, and we see ourselves as part of that movement. Considering the relations between oral history, feminist consciousness-raising and anti-psychiatric group practices, we want to engage in the mediations of these practices, not as reproductions of events, but as an integrated part of collective action. The group therapy model becomes reminiscent of the collective work of art.

In conversation with Eva la Cour, Mia Edelgard, Cara Tolmie, Joen Vedel, Lisbeth W. Sørensen, and M.E. O’Brien, we will develop documents and group practices that reflect their own collective forms. Imagining the ways in which Astrid Noack shared her practice with friends, colleagues and neighbors, the project takes its starting point in intimate relations. It centers on developing scores for mediation that reflect social relations, experiences and communalities – a kind of sensory media needed for envisioning public forms and collective lives otherwise.

PROGRAM:

Tuesday 16 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #1

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Wednesday 17 September, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Opening of High Sensitivity Media Group at Astrid Noack’s Atelier

Public conversation between Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg. Opening the program at Astrid Noack’s Atelier, Sandström and Dahlberg will interweave their practices and thinking of transcription and film in conversation, moving from cinema archives to the Italian 1970s and back.

Tuesday 23 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #2

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Wednesday 24 September, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Highly Sensitive Media, a public screening program with Kajsa Dahlberg, Cara Tolmie, Mia Edelgart, Eva la Cour and Joen Vedel, followed by a conversation between Joen Vedel, Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg.

Tuesday 30 September, 18:00 – 19:00. Location: YNKB, Baldersgade 70, 2200 Copenhagen.

Reading group session #3

After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept by Pinko Collective (2023)

This reading group is open for everyone, however if you want to be informed about the reading, email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com for information about the readings.

Thursday 2 October, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Conversation and highly sensitive mediation with and by Cara Tolmie, Mia Edelgart, Eva la Cour, Frida Sandström and Kajsa Dahlberg. Sandström and Dahlberg have invited Tolmie, Edelgart, la Cour, together with whom they have developed a collective score for documenting a group conversation that self-reflects its own vulnerability.

Sunday 5 October, 12:00 – 15:00. Location: Opuc, Nørregade 11, 1. sal, 3300 Frederiksværk.

Workshop and conversation with Lisbeth W. Sørensen. Maximum number of participants to be confirmed. Registration needed  – email fvsandstrom[at]gmail.com by the 29th of September.

In this workshop, we will be guided by organic psychotherapist Lisbeth W. Sørensen through a group practice of centering, call and response and system oriented training, in which analogue film and manual transcription, introduced by Dahlberg and Sandström, are deployed as forms that both extend and reflect the practice.

Wednesday 8 October, 17:00 – 19:00. Location: ANA.

Based on her practice as a psychoanalyst, former coordinator of the Trans Oral History Project, and the book projects After Accountability: A Critical Genealogy of a Concept (Pinko Collective, 2023), Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (together with Eman Abdelhadi, Common Notions, 2022), M.E. O’Brien will introduce her work on the relation between oral histories and psychoanalysis, followed by a conversation between M.E. O’Brien and Frida Sandström. This event is funded by OIKOS: Omsorg og Krise i det 21. Århundrede, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen.

The project is supported by the Danish Art’s Foundation.

BIO:

Frida Sandström is a writer and critic based in Copenhagen. She has recently completed her PhD thesis on feminist critiques of art and sexuality; Dropout Subjects. Jill Johnston’s and Carla Lonzi’s Disintegration and Deculturalization of Art Criticism as Social Critique in 1969. Sandström’s essays, articles and art criticism are published widely in Sweden and internationally, and her curatorial, critical and artistic projects often evolve in collaboration. She is editorial board member of the transdisciplinary academic journal Woman, Gender & Research and a contributing editor of the Swedish art journal Paletten. She is in her 4th year of a therapist-training program with a focus on system-centered therapy at Opuc.

Kajsa Dahlberg is a visual artist and researcher whose work is informed by queer life practices – its theories, and affinities. Dahlberg’s work investigates things like the materiality of film based on a desire to problematize the medium’s relation to representation, including the relations between the artist and the object of investigation. Dahlberg received her MFA at The Art Academy in Malmö 1998–2003 and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Program in New York 2007–08. She finished her PhD Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images, which examines how non-human life-forms are part of shaping (our human) visual culture, from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm in 2024.

Cara Tolmie spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body – how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener, and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. Within this she often explores performative techniques that dis-/reorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of defamiliarised, uncanny, and repetitive vocalisation. Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm.

Eva la Cour is a visual artist working across academic research and image-making, often through long-term collaborative constellations. Her practice involves process-oriented filmmaking to explore the role of art in relation to Danish colonial history and its entanglement with present-day ecological and social crises. She holds a practice-based PhD in artistic research from HDK-Valand (University of Gothenburg), where her thesis examined relational practice through collaborative live editing. She is currently a postdoc at the Department of Art and Cultural Studies and the Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CAPE), University of Copenhagen.

Joen Vedel is a visual artist, writer and researcher, educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and PhD in Artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim. Vedel primarily works with video, sound, text, performance and in various forms of collaborations. He has been a member of numerous artist and activist collectives and self-organized spaces. He has exhibited widely internationally and participated at Documenta 15 in Kassel, amongst others.

Mia Edelgart is a visual artist who works non media specified, varying between collective and singular processes. Her works unfold in relation to long-lasting research processes, often involving interviews and conversations in various ways. She has often worked from an interest in relational intelligence, knowledge hierarchies and learning processes. As a pivotal part of her practice she is engaged in various self-organized (art)schools and collectives as means of facilitating alternative spaces for learning, sensing and sharing. Besides, Edelgart is in her 4th year of a therapist-training program with a focus on system-centered therapy at Opuc.

Lisbeth W. Sørensen is a psychotherapist with specialization in embodied relational processes. She has trained in body-psychotherapy, gestalt therapy, organic, psychodynamic therapy and Systems-Centered Therapy. Sørensen is founder and daily leader of Opuc.

M.E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish. Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City’s LGBTQ social movements.

Oscar Lara’s project Corónica Reframing the Treasure is based on the Inca manuscript El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which is in the collection of the Danish Royal Library. The 17th-century manuscript addresses the Spanish king to ask the Spanish colonial power to relinquish its control over the South American indigenous peoples and their lands. Corónica bears witness to the struggle of colonised indigenous peoples for the right to self-determination and highlights how this struggle remains a radical and utopian vision in a time when the neocolonial extractive logics of capitalism have abstracted the relations of exploitation.

—

OPENING: Thursday, 14 August, 5–7 pm.

CONVERSATION: Saturday, 6 September, 3-4 pm.

In this conversation between Oscar Lara and Emil Elg they will be talking about Guamán Poma’s manuscript “El primer nueva crónica y buen gobierno”, its current display at the “Treasure” room in the Royal Danish Library, and the new display proposals exhibited i ANA and made by the architects Llosa Cartagena and Luisa Yupa per Oscar’s invitation.

This conversation will be in English.

—

Katarina Stenbeck: Can you tell me about the title for your project Reframing the Treasure, what does it mean?

Oscar Lara: I would say that the title is quite literal. It is trying to suggest some sort of institutional responsibility by including the word treasure, which refers to the title of the permanent exhibition at the Danish Royal Library, where the manuscript of Felipe de Guamán Poma is hosted. To some extend I wonder who has the right to decide what a treasure is, and under what parameters. And reframing comes because the show is like an experiment of re-looking, and re-designing and re-working this exhibition. But in reality, it can’t be re-worked under the given conditions of my presence in Copenhagen, but it can be re-“framed” by the means of art.

KS: Yes, it’s interesting that the presentation of a small selection of the materials in the Royal Danish Library’s collection is titled Treasures. Obviously, a treasure can be many things and achieved through different means but here it’s difficult not to associate it with rare and exotic objects of uncertain provenance. This might not be the case, but the space and the installation of the exhibition emphasizes the sense of the materials being treasures, which is also what you’re interested in and why you want to consider other ways of contextualising the manuscript. What is the history of this manuscript of Felipe de Guamán Poma, how did it end up in a Danish book collection?

OL: That is actually a mystery. Some scholars will suggest that this ‘book’ could have been given as a diplomatic gift to a Danish diplomat. The manuscript was intended to reach the Spanish King Felipe III, but it never actually reached his hands, it is understood that other Spanish officials received the manuscript and that it was not destroyed due to its ‘artistic quality’. It is an amazing piece, and I assume that even in those days any trained diplomat must have recognised its intrinsic value. What is a fact, is that there is no documented path tracing it to Denmark, but it has been in Denmark since the early 1660s.

KS: You have previously worked with relocated cultural heritage, what kind of potentials do these objects hold and what do they make possible?

OL: That is quite a complex question. I like to believe that they do carry value to a dimension that at times is not well understood by us, but I often witness that their potential is constructed by the built apparatus that is designed around them to facilitate its instrumentalization. Often the architecture or space around the objects instils them with a specific value. The value is build depending on what can be achieved out of these objects. What kind of cultural value can be profited from their uses? I often find that it exemplifies the continuous exercise of colonial extractivism. But of course, these presentations do make possible a constant inquiry to a better understanding of our past. The fact that these objects are still around us is also a statement on its own. That is the way I understand them and perhaps the reason why they intrigue me and make me react by using the field I have access to.

KS: In the exhibition at ANA you speculate about other ways of understanding and displaying the manuscript, do you already have an idea about what this fictional recontextualization might unfold?

OL: I think that at this point the project is a collaboration that will surface these fractures I mention, which are not often spotted. It raises questions as why is this item treated this way? Who has access to it? What are the uses of the manuscript and what do they mean for the local Danish context? What would it mean in a Peruvian context? I think that so far, the manuscript has been resting comfortably. The Peruvian side seems to be glad or satisfied by its current location and vice versa. The fictional setting proposed by the exhibition aims to expose these issues by re-thinking the repository of this manuscript and making these ideas public. I consider this a utopian initiative due to the complexity of the context, but I hope that the project can contribute to the awareness of the existence of other voices in terms of the display of this material. Either way, I am convinced that it is important even just to feel entitled to question these issues and explore them through the field of art.

—

The exhibition is open to the public on 23 and 30 August, 12–3 p.m., and by appointment. For further information and visits at other times, please contact katarina@roda-softwateronhardstone.org or carla@roda-softwateronhardstone.org

The exhibition is part of the initial phase of Oscar Lara’s project roda – soft water on hard stone, which will unfold over the next two years.

roda – soft water on hard stone is an art project that explores the consequences of the logic of colonial and capitalist violence. The project looks at how we can develop a greater sensitivity to the coexistence of human and more-than-human worlds that can guide us towards other ways of living, learning, creating and believing. roda – soft water on hard stone unfolds as three sea voyages in the opposite direction of the European colonial trade route, nine art commissions and the event programme The Glossary on Wisdom & Worldmaking, curated by Katarina Stenbeck & Carla Zaccagnini. 

BIO:

Oscar Lara is a visual artist based in Stockholm and Lima. Drawing on social practices, Lara explores the relationship between art and structural change by looking at how recontextualising cultural materials can activate decolonial struggles.

Emil Elg was recently awarded a ph.d. at the University of Copenhagen. In his research he looks at the contact zone between Danish art history and colonial history.

The project is supported by the Bikuben Foundation and the Danish Art’s Foundation.

ANA and the text collective Fredag ​​​​Aften are pleased to present a screening of the essay film Att ha rätt (English: To Be Right) from 2023 by the Swedish visual artist David Torstensson. The film will be accompanied by an installation at ANA. After the screening, Fredag ​​​​Aften invites you for some food and a conversation about some of the film’s themes. 

The following day, Torstensson will invite you to a drawing workshop about weight, lightness, work and rest based on some of the objects that appear in the film. There will be an opportunity to watch the film before and after the workshop.

In Att ha rätt, a father’s involvement in a small communist vanguard party is placed in relation to his free church background. The film portrays both a personal grieving process and suggests a different political legacy than the father’s intended one. Is there/there anything to learn for collective practice today? 

Att ha rätt is the first part of a two-part essay film project entitled För sen ankomst (English: Tardy Arrival), which takes as it´s starting point individual examples of Christian and communist organizing in the context of the southern Swedish region of Småland. The second part, with the working title Läsesällskapet (English: The Reading Community), examines through theater-based processes collective closeness and distance in a small Christian revival that at the end of the 18th century is said to have collectivized their belongings in order to serve God full-time. För sen ankomst 2 (English: Tardy Arrival 2) will be presented at a later date.

PROGRAMME

Saturday, June 28

6 pm        – Door opens

6.30 pm   – Introduction and screening

7.30 pm   – Food and conversation

Sunday, June 29

11 am to 4 pm        – Video installation open

12.30 pm to 3 pm   – Drawing workshop

BIO: David Torstensson (b. 1987) lives in Malmö and works as an artist and pedagogue. He is educated at the Oslo Academy of Fine Arts, Malmö Academy of Fine Arts and the Stockholm School of Art and Design. Torstensson primarily works with slow, research-based film processes and collective, situation-based art practice – preferably in collaborative constellations.

BIO: Friday Evening met every Thursday for a few years to produce a digital weekly newsletter of the same name. Since then, they have published forewords and translations as well as irregularly organized public programs and discussions.

The events at ANA are realised with funding from Nordic Culture Point

During their two-part residency in ANA, Hanni Kamaly will to work on a project with the working title Object/Other. The project is an artistic exploration of the historical interplay between research, politics, museology and art, with the aim of showing how these elements together constituted a form of knowledge production that has left traces in our contemporary visual and material culture. The project is based on research into the use of visual media, photographs and sculptures in the representation of ‘races’ and how this helped shape the political landscape.

Art from antiquity was seen as beautiful and as an expression of a higher civilisation more developed than other “races”, and Greek sculptures from antiquity were used to assert the superiority of the “white race”. The white marble became a symbol. A comparison between Greek sculptures and the white or Nordic was also used in theories of phrenology and skull measurements. This later found its counterpart in ethnographic sculptures. Artworks created to present and illustrate differences between the so-called ‘human races.’ Several sculptors were active in this type of artistic practice. Among them was Ellen Locher-Thalbitzer, daughter of the painter Carl Locher, married to the ethnographer William Thalbitzer and contemporary with Astrid Noack. Together with her husband, she travelled to Greenland, where she sculpted several portraits and works of art.

FILM SCREENING & CONVERSATION:

On Thursday 26th June at 5pm we will be showing Hanni Kamaly’s HeadHandEye (2017-2018), In this video work Kamaly interweaves images and stories in associative thought chains that reveal how power has always been exercised by controlling and dehumanising the body of the other. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) claimed that infants initially experience their body as separate parts but that the brain, in the mirror stage, connects the fragmented body into a whole, and that this is when the Subject emerges. Kamaly’s film shows the reverse course of events, namely how the Subject is torn to pieces and becomes an Object at the mercy of authority. The title of the film names three parts of the body that are vital to our ability to manifest ourselves in the world –head, hand and eye. Throughout the ages, these body parts have been severed as punishment for breaking the rules and challenging the rulers.The fragmented body can then be used in the ensuing process of dehumanising.

After the screening, Hanni Kamaly will have a conversation with critic Frida Sandstrom about the research on Ellen Locher-Thalbitzer, a project that weaves together visual culture, ethnography, and history with the aim of addressing patriarchal, colonial, and racist structures that still exist today.

There will be wine and snacks after the talk.

BIO:

Hanni Kamaly (b. in Hedmark, 1988) is a research-based artist based in Malmö. Kamaly’s practice uncovers narratives of subject making through sculpture, film and performance. Kamaly intervenes into racial and colonial history to emphasise moments of dehumanisation and the construction of the Other. 

Frida Sandström is a critic and PhD fellow in Modern Culture at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Sandström teaches art history and critical theory at several Scandinavian universities and art academies. Her research particularly focuses on feminist collaborative practices.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation.