​MARIANNE SKJELDAL

Utopian Gardens is a collective documentation of LATERNA’s artistic project CoSA Garden // Pollinary Dances (2018–2022). It contains contributions from artists and partners who participated in the project, as well as invited guests. For us, it is a hybrid publication, a mixture of an artist’s book, an archive, and a space for ongoing reflection.

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The intention of CoSA Garden // Pollinary Dances was originally to choreograph the installation and development of sister gardens in Oslo, Norway, and St. Petersburg, Russia. In Oslo, we worked closely with Black Box teater to create a vertical garden on an exterior wall. In St. Petersburg we partnered with the Museum of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde to continue developing an existing garden with an artistic heritage extending back to the early 1900s. CoSA Garden // Pollinary Dances is part of LATERNA’s long-term project CoSA – Concerning the Spiritual in Art (2017–2023).

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Our wish was for the CoSA gardens to continue to grow, blossom, and thrive in their specific urban environments after our initial facilitation of interactions between people and a more-than-human world. Our choreographic practice takes place in dialogue with nature, plants, place, people in this place, and the past, present, and future. We wanted to explore how building and growing the two gardens could create movements both small and large, as part of a local and trans-national choreography, a pollinary dance.

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A number of events and issues—the pandemic, bureaucratic hurdles in Oslo, uncertainty surrounding the future location of Black Box teater, and finally, war—prevented us from realizing the gardens as originally planned and forced us to pursue alternative artistic routes in order to continue our collaborations and the idea of sister gardens. The gardens shape-shifted and transformed into other performative formats and actions that maintained the intentions, values, and content from the core ideas of the project. The project evolved into multiple themes and created much more work than we had first imagined possible.

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Our collaboration with the Museum of the St. Petersburg Avant-Garde ended in 2022 due to the Russo-Ukrainian war. In the period 2018-2020, prior to the pandemic, we visited and worked in the museum garden during different seasons on a number of occasions. By the time the collaboration ended, half of the detailed garden plan had been carried out and the museum will continue on its own with some of the plans we had made together.

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We made it a priority to maintain the collaboration and relations with the individual Russian artists involved, all of whom work independently in the arts. Together we created a conceptual garden in the form of a project space in Oslo, where we spent time together, working and sharing our practices for two weeks and opening our doors to the public—as any public garden would.

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During the project we have learned a lot about patience, resilience, collaboration, force majeure and how rigid Norwegian bureaucracy can be, but also how surprisingly easy it was to start rebuilding a garden in Russia, and finally, how easy it was to let it go when we had to.

But before doing so, we were filled with hopes and vivid dreams of creating these green lungs as social meeting points where people could come together to interact with plants, soil, each other and art, to learn and exchange, and by doing so, hopefully gain a sense of belonging to and community with these places.

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Utopia means literally “nowhere,” and utopian means “impossibly visionary.” This describes our sense of the work on this book. It makes visible the collective of people who shared our visions and all the effort, care, work, planning, communication, joining of forces, listening, negotiation, art, and collaboration that took place while we worked and waited for our gardens to fully unfold.

We see this book as a way of planting new seeds in continuation of Pollinary Dances. Listening to each other as we have done during this project, despite all the challenges, we are still hopeful for our shared future.

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LATERNA

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Utopian Gardens is currently to be sold at Kunstbok Oslo November 15 & 16 and will be sold at Kunstnernes Hus bookshop after that. Our book can also be bought at Norma T, or by contacting LATERNA directly.