Multispecies Festivities
at Roskilde Festival '17

At Roskilde Festival 2017, Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology presented an international program of installations, performances, readings and talks as part of Roskilde Festival’s art programme contemplating and experimenting with the formation of more-than-human communion - attempting to stay with the trouble of summoning the non-human residents of the festival-site and probing our own particular ways and means of response-ability;

Johannes Heldén and Angela Rawlings performed haunting ecopoet(h)ics and astroecologies to meditate on trauma and loss of place; Forlaget Virkelig read to us from their beautiful catalogue of ecoliteratures past and present, with the launch of the Danish translation of Ursula K le Guin's 'Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'; Eben Kirksey and Dehlia Hannah hosted queer ecoromantic ceremonies with human-frog weddings and human-trophilaxis & queer ant life performances, Marie Kølbæk Iversen orchestrated a whispering-machine of tired festival bodies, Lisbeth Bank presented a giant rainbow worm - a living compost system; the multidisciplinary group, composed of engineers, visual artists, programmers, a biologist, a forester, a writer, and an architect, collaborated in making the interactive installation Human-Tree-Machine*, plunging into the speculative and problematic scenario of being able to chat with a one of the festival sites' permanent residents: a 40 year old chestnut tree; David Stjernholm speculated in the perfect design for an art zone for the sites' ant residents; Adam Bencard unfolded the truth about our microbial identities; Joshua Evans conducted a Larval Bug Juice lecture; Jens Hauser un-greened the green; and finally, Natasja Loutchko and Jessie Holmes carried our bodies into the last magical Roskilde Festival hours with their fermenting Poison Paradise Bar.

With this program, we wanted to ask what happens when species meet at Roskilde Festival? What sort of bodies, languages and senses are confronted (and colliding) when the few days of the festival are reaching into the rest of the year? We were interested in working with the different cycles at stake in and around the festival and ask how we could investigate - and not least creatively attempt to work with - some of the potentially problematic impact on the site’s non-human residents.

The program was created in collaboration with Roskilde Festival's curatorial team - a special big thanks to Ida Schyum and Joachim Friis for their hard work on this program.

*Human-Tree-Machine: Martin Malthe Borch, Elena Lundqvist Ortíz, Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt, Peter Hjetting, Johan Pedersen, André Hansen, Andreas Refsgaard, Lasse Korsgaard, Kasper Holm, Line Kjær, Line Hvidbjerg, Rebeca Lundqvist Ortíz, Alex Ramskov Johannsen, Kristina Sand Pedersen.