marit mihklepp

What is a garden? Is it the same for a botanist, a molecular biologist, a philosopher, a visual artist, a sound artist, the owner, the gardener, a curator, for the birds nesting in the trees and bushes, for the worms, fungi and bacteria in the soil, for the plants themselves?

We spent two days observing and interpreting the small garden at the Malina House in Paris. We were digging into the soil, smelling the roots and autumn leaves, drawing the movements of snails.

Cartography of a Garden

‘Mineral Everybodies’ featured in Arterritory.com

screenshot from the website Arterritory.com

It was a pleasure to find my new piece ‘Mineral Everybodies’ featured as a title image at Arterritory.com! Una Meistere interviewed the curators of our group exhibition ‘Point of No Return. Attunement of Attention’ Saskia Lillepuu and Ann Mirjam Vaikla. All photos in the article are made by Hedi Jaansoo.

Link to the interview

Roots & Seeds XXI residency in April-May 2022

image from the Roots & Seeds XXI FB page

I am excited to be the recipient of the Roots & Seeds XXI Research Residency at Malina House in Paris (April 2022), where I would be diving into the root-soil-mineral entanglements in collaboration with my friend, an ecologist and conservation scientist Meredith Root-Bernstein.

NART residency in January/April 2021

video still from the new video installation ‘mineral everybodies’

I had the pleasure to work for three weeks at the beautiful historicist villa of Narva Art Residency (NART), where together with the local stones I was developing a new piece for the upcoming group exhibition ‘Point of No Return. Attunement of Attention’. ‘mineral everybodies’ is a video installation centred around listening to and moving along with the floor of the exhibition space and the stones from Narva river.

The exhibition will be open to the public from May 3, 2021.

‘Mineral Everybodies’ was commissioned by NART curators Saskia Lillepuu and Ann Mirjam Vaikla, and supported by Eesti Kultuurkapital and Stroom Den Haag.

HALL08 ‘An Encounter Gathering’ in April 2021 (Dommelhof: Neerpelt, BE)

work process in September 2020, photo by Ilona van den Brekel

Collective processes of moving-thinking with the Dommelhof forest and building a concentrated space for encounters between human and more-than-human have been fermenting into an opening. The guided silent walk through the ‘encounter portal’ will be waiting for its audience on April 10, 17 and 24 at 3:00 pm and 4:00 pm. In the foyer of Dommelhof visitors can experience the live archive showing the continuous work flow of the long-term project HALL33 by TAAT.

More information (in Dutch)

Live archive of TAAT

Residency at Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artistes (St-Jean-Port-Joli, Canada)

Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artistes, studio view

From mid-September till mid-November in 2019 I was honoured to participate in a residency at Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artistes where I continued working with the geologic time and stone bodies. I was researching how the seemingly non-living and non-moving participates in the making of living and moving, how the stones and meteorites have entered human lives, and how would it be possible to communicate with the geologic in the simplest of ways of listening and touching. The name ‘Living or Nearly So’ is referring to a text in ‘The Overstory’ by Richard Powers.

This residency was part of Creative European Pepinieres and Est-Nord-Est Centre mobility program and kindly supported by CALQ, Stroom Den Haag and Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Holobiont Tales

I am happy to announce that my artistic research piece ‘Holobiont Tales’ is featured in Migrant Journal No.5: Micro Odysseys!

By exploring our microbial identities and how they challenge our view on individuality, I gathered saliva samples and interviewed six international artists while participating in a collective symposium in Southern Estonia.

Obsessed by the movements of humans, the ‘big picture’ and the mega-infrastructure that make their circulation possible, we forget that every great journey has its origin below the radar. The planetary and the microscopic are not necessarily in opposition—life is but a flow of minerals. Disease, seeds, plants, fauna have travelled the world, and back again, echoing humanity’s stories of exploration, exploitation and colonisation.

In this fifth and penultimate issue, we explore the microscopic in movement: from shooting stars to shifting sands, bacteria in Estonia and particles in Geneva, mosquitoes in fascist Italy and tuberculosis in Indian cities, micro-plastics floating in the Pacific Ocean, Roman weeds and their mysterious migration to Copenhagen.

— image and above text from the website of Migrant Journal: https://migrantjournal.com

Guided audio walk inside the publication Meaning Seeking Animals by Lisa van Casand

Moving through the text fragments collected by Lisa van Casand as a landscape, I was commissioned by oneacre.online to compose an instructed audio walk as an additional layer to the online publication and a guide for the audience.

Meaning Seeking Animals explores the possibility of a publication as a world, it is a personal collection of digested knowledge that keeps on growing as the artist proceeds to make new work. It is a world, or an aura, a field where the artist’s internal experience of knowledge building has been deposited, for a long while privately and now made public. The diverse collection of excerpts and fragments combines sources from biology, philosophy, art and psychology grows and forms as a terra under the thoughtful care of Lisa van Casand.

The publication could be thought along the more traditional or familiar notions of a captain’s diary, notebook, or log — but as a collection of knowledge it is much closer to how Walter Benjamin envisioned the dream world “an autonomous world of dreams circling the earth at night”. Upon arrival the publication gives no specific reading direction, no middle and no end. But like a topographical map it offers a guide for locating positions, or intersections, in the form of audio-walks provided by artist Marit Mihklepp, theorist Aleid de Jong and geographer Jacob Knegtel.

— text and digital landscape by oneacre.online.

Collective residency ‘Expanded Body #2 _ Inhabiting Time. An experience about Time in Oasi Zegna’ (Biella, IT)

For a week in July 2018, we gathered in Biella and Oasi Zegna protected Alpine mountain area in Italy for a shared expedition about time for the living and non-living, mentored by Italian artist duo Raffaella Spagna and Andrea Caretto. I was studying the possibilities of releasing fossil sounds from the geologic matter and collaborating with stones to tune human senses to the immense scale of deep time.

What is Time? How do we perceive the flow of Time and what is our relationship with it? What is Time for a plant? How can we approach the Deep Time of rocks? What is the relationship between the Time of machines, of human beings and natural cycles? What is free Time? What is Time for contemporary physics?

— from the website of Cittadellarte: http://www.cittadellarte.it/unidee/activity.html?id=102