This autumn Rob undertook a long train journey from France to Norway and Finland and back, where he gave a talk at Piksel in Bergen and at the Saari Residence near Turku, about his journey and discussing ‘The Art of Slow Travel and the Future of Transportation’. He was funded by Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation for his travel and the Saari Residence welcomed him back as a returning Fellow after his residency in 2019. Pictures below by Jeremy Welsh and Pirre Naukkarinan. You can see his blog of the journey on his Instagram account here. Also, if you want to connect with Rob on BlueSky he is now here.
Earlier this year, Rob visited Live Art Ireland in County Tipperary from his home base in France to take part in the Considering Time workshop led by artists Marilyn Arsem and Mark Leahy. He was funded by Creative Europe Culture Moves Europe to travel to Ireland. At the end of the workshop he undertook a 3 hour durational performance ‘Considering Mark’s Bicycle’ which consisted of dismantling and re-assembling an ancient bike owned by the late Live Art Ireland’s cofounder MJ Newell. It was a homage to the Bangalore artist Suresh Kumar, who started his performance career by dismantling and re-assembling his late father’s bicycle. An extract can be seen on Instagram here. Below are the workshop participants, including Deej Fabyc, to the right, CEO of Live Art Ireland. Rob is working with Deej and others to create a new European project: Performance and Live Art Yearly Assembly (PLAYA).
You can see Rob’s latest artistic collaborations on this website here, see the Let the Birds Have The Skies video here and his performance Close To The Water here. The portfolio of his current and recent projects is here.
Here‘s a long interview he recently did with 98 year old performance artist Ken Turner.
Rob’s long read on the More The Planet Symposium, ‘On The Same Planet’, first published in Makery has been republished by TBA-Academy’s Ocean Archive here He also moderated (below).
Rob doing the performance ‘Close To The Water’ at ArtBomb 2022 in Doncaster. (Photo Phillip Haig) Watch this space for upcoming projects.
Installing Let The Birds Have The Skies at Gare Maritime, Tour and Taxis, Brussels, in September 2023. with the team from Transport & Environment. Learn more here
AEROCENE – BRING THE SUN DOWN
Aerocene – Bring The Sun Down Rob’s article for Makery on the latest launch by the Aerocene Community.
TAKE THE TRAIN NOT THE PLANE
Photo: Lola Perrin
Early in 2023 Rob and composer pianist Lola Perrin travelled the railways of Europe recording passengers’ voices and capturing images and sounds, to create a new artistic project about taking the train and not flying in Europe, for the Travel Smart Campaign of Transport And Environment, a campaigning NGO in Europe. The soundtrack is Lola Perrin’s original composition for piano ‘Let The Birds Have The Skies’. It will be released online and live in Brussels in June 2023. More details to come soon. Watch this space and read more about the project here:
Here is Rob doing the latest version of his performance ‘Close To The Water – Let the Boat Sing! on the River Don with Doncaster Rowing Club for the festival ArtBomb 2022. (Photo Philip Haigh) You can see the video here.
Fermenting the Social. Hackers, Makers, Thinkers. Rob’s take on the Art Laboratory Berlin conference.
The video from this conference, in which Rob discusses art on the Moon and gives a keynote ‘Pushing The Envelope’ is now available here.
Interview with Emilia Tikka, Erich Berger and Leena and Oula A Valkeapää
Hopeful Monsters. Article on ‘Airship Dreams’ at Bedford Creative Arts. Interview with artist Mike Stubbs
Retrofitting the Earth. Article in Medium.com on artist/inventor Cedric Carles
Rob appeared in this in a second version of ‘Re-imagining The Incident’. Video coming soon.
Read Rob’s latest article on the Wrapping of the Arc De Triomphe in Summer 2021 by Christo and Jeanne Claude.
Rob made this video to mark 35 years of curating and 70 years on the planet. It lists all the artists he can remember working with as curator, co-curator and collaborator.
The Incident, video of the symposium ‘Sym-bi-o/living together at the limits of Science’. The event was organised by Rob at Belluard-Bollwerk Fribourg and ICA London 1995/6, then revisited in April 2021 at the University of Creative Arts. Here’s Rob with artist and co-organiser James Turrell in 1995. Also blog of the event by Sally Annett.
Photo ©Eliane Laubscher
Dialogue with Tomás Saraceno for UNAM Mexico City. Rob discusses with Tomás his latest solar-powered free flight among other things.
Interview with Liverpool Biennial Curator – The Port as Stomach
Pictured: Black Obsidian Sound System ©BOSS
And Yet It Deviates. Interview with Harvard Astronomer Avi Loeb on his book ‘Extraterrestrial‘.
Psychic Refuge.
New interview with artist Sophie Hoyle
The Bat That Therefore I Am
Necatar-feeding bat foraging. Photo Ralph Simon.
At the end of 2020 Rob wrote a series of five new art and science interviews. Read them all here:
Leaky Bodies – the transgressive bioart of Margherita Pevere
On Microplastics and co-existence – Interview with Kat Austen
The Bat That Therefore I Am – Exploring The Eye of The Other
Forms of Ownership – Interview With Vienne Chan and Boris Oichermann
Tiny Mining – Exploring the Extreme Ecologies of the body
Crash! Rob on the Arts Labs.
Photo courtesy Pamela Zoline
Going to the Drury Lane Arts Lab and the New London Arts Lab in the ’60’s inflenced Rob’s life as an curator, writer and artist. Here’s a review of a new book on the Arts Labs. He’s also a board member of ISEA International, which happened virtually last October in Montreal, Canada, and here is an interview with the programme Director of ISEA2020.
New writing by Rob on Ars Electronica’s Traveling Plant and Manifesta 13 in Marseille.
Photo of performance by Lina Lapleyete at Manifesta 13 opening by Aurélian Meimaris.
Rob’s virtual performance of Close To The Water at Art Meets Radical Openness, Linz and Piksel, Bergen.
Rob’s recent interview with artist Dasha Ilina
Slower Travel. Negotiating post-viral geographies.
London under clear skies. Read about an idea on new mobilities after the lockdown
Slow Travel
Read Rob’s no-fly blog
Big Data In The Snow!
Article about data and protest at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
And his reviews of Transmediale and ‘Genders’ at London’s Science Gallery
Extensive documentation of Edge of An Era, curated by Rob with Helena Goldwater and Live Art Development Agency, and including a guided tour of Edge 88 sites in Clerkenwell, can be seen here. Photo of the launch of the project at St James Church Clerkenwell, below.
Blast From The Past. Read the catalogue of No Such Thing As Gravity Curated by Rob and Mike Stubbs for the Nation Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts with Rob’s essay ‘Spooky Action’.
All the Art After The Collapse talks, curated by Rob, are now available to listen on Soundart Radio here
At the Saari Residence. During September and October 2019 Rob was a Fellow at the Saari Residence, Turku, Finland, funded by the Kone Foundation
Photos Jussi Virkumma/Kone Foundation
MEET THE SAARI FELLOW: ROB LA FRENAIS
At the Saari Residence, the independent curator of contemporary art and writer Rob La Frenais is working simultaneously on two themes: the Moon and Water. ”I have created a ‘Moon Room’ in the Barn where I am collecting material about art and the Moon, from time to time I am inviting the other fellows to come and watch films about the Moon and add their own comments and ideas for research. I am working on an extended essay ‘Mirroring The Moon’ that will be the basis for a book. I am also working on a young adult fiction novel ‘Wild Way To The Moon’,” he says.
His second project involves exploring the archipelago surrounding the Saari Residence. ”In the harbour, I am using the Saari vessel the “Lovisa” to explore this part of the Archipelago. I have already taken some of the fellows on an expedition to a small island in the middle of the sea. I am hoping to research a new project that will be realised in Finland about artists floating vehicles. I am hoping to do some active research on a new floating vehicle in the harbour, weather permitting,” he tells.
During his time there, he hopes to combine thinking and pondering in his own workspace with exploration of the Saari Residence’s environment. In his work, he utilises action research, dialogue with the other artists at the residence and surveys. In Saari, Rob starts his day by going to the Moon Room. Weather permitting, he will go to the shore of the island, the bird observation tower and other interesting places. In the evenings, he continues his research in the Moon Room. (Pirre Naukarrinen)
More from Makery.info by Rob
“She Can See Land!- Cross the Atlantic like Greta”.
Read the article written as Greta Thunberg landed.
Orbital River Station
HeHe’s Orbital River Station – Photo copyright Bipolar
Rob visted Big Torrent by the famous bridge in Avignon as part of Big Torrent. Read his article about HeHe’s Orbital River Station and other projects in Makery.info and read his previous article on Green Culture Traincamp here Also, read his latest Art Monthly article here: Art Monthly XR (Copyright Art Monthly and Exact Editions) Also Rob’s Summer 2019 Newsletter is now out. Read it here
Rob recently took part in the Leonardo workshop – Space Art, Science and Culture Of Some Visions in/for the 21st Century here and attended the ITTACUS meeting at the Spring meeting of the International Astronautical Federation here.
Rob’s other articles for Makery.info in order of publication:
Extinction Rebellion organises its first “die-in” in Paris
COP24: how artists commit to the climate
In London, scientists, artists and activists surge to save the Humans
COP21: maiden flight of the zero carbon hot air balloon
(about project curated by Rob by Ewen Chardronnet)
Digifest, a life hacking festival in South Africa
How Wolgang Tillmans is rebranding Europe
Robertina Šebjanič, the artist who whispered into the ears of axolotls
And the first speaker is… a horse
Bicycling on Mars
In 1988 Rob directed the major exhibition and event EDGE 88. It has been revisited by the Edge of An Era project described in this essay by Eleanor Roberts here
Also this new review in The Wire
Dance In The Madhouse – Ulrike Rosenbach in Edge 88
The Ghost Tide, curated by Sarah Sparkes and Monika Bobinska
Read this new essay on ‘The Ghost Tide by Rob here
Two new articles on the Climate emergency. Deep Time and Save The Humans, Rob writes in Art Monthly UK and Makery.info
Robert Smithson’s Spiral jetty is now drying out. Read Rob’s latest article in Art Monthly on art and the climate emergency here: Deeptime1, Deeptime2, Deeptime3, Deeptime4, Deeptime5, Deeptime6 and in Makery.info here (copyright Art Monthly and Exact Editions)
Video of Close To The Water Performance
The video of Rob doing the performance of ‘Close To The Water’ at New Performance Turku by Chris Hewitt is here. Weather conditions, the movement of the ‘Fori’ (ferry) and the range of the radio mike brought a random element to the amount of text that could be heard so a longer version of of the text is here: Close to the Water performance text
New book out now Self Etc – Anne Bean, edited by Rob.
Order it here. Launched in November 2018
Doing the lecture performance ‘Close To The Water’ from a single scull boat on the River Aura, Turku, Finland
This beautiful picture by poet Robert Powell sums up the atmosphere after Rob’s lecture/performance Close To the Water, which took place on Friday September 21, as the opening keynote for Turku New Performance Festival. With great support from the rowers of Turku Rowing Club, Turun Soutajat.
REVIEW OF ISEA2018/DIGIFEST IN DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA
(scroll down for bio)
Syabonga, one of the attendees with a nice sense of humour…
Read Rob’s recent account in Makery.info here
SUOMENLINNA BLOG
I am on Suomenlinna Island in Finland right now, doing a curatorial residency at Helsinki International Art Programme supported by HIAP and FRAME Contemporary Art Finland. The island is a short ride from Market Square in Helsinki and this is a daily commute for the people who live on the island, often across the foggy Baltic Sea. it’s an interesting commute.
There are hardly any vehicles on the island, except for bicycles, and trolleys are needed to get luggage across the cobbled streets of this ancient fortress island. Here is Miina, from HIAP waiting to welcome me with the residency trolley.
On the first morning of my residency I explore this mysterious foggy Island, and its fortified remnants of many conflicts over Finland’s territory.
Straight into my residency I am taking part in the Radical Relevances conference at Aalto University, organised by artist Pia Lindman. This is a an extraordinary gathering of artists, environmentalists, biologists, geographers, anthropologists and activists. One of the themes is the non-human, and appropriately the first workshop is given by a horse, Finnhorse Kristoffer, with his human collaborator, Riika Latva-Somppi
Performance artist Kira O’Reilly looks on – she is here in Finland running an MA in Ecology and Contemporary Performance (MEACP) at Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts in Helsinki. Her recent book Untitled (Bodies) has an essay by me on her work – Falling Asleep with a Pig. I am here to give my presentation Bicycling on Mars – Thoughts on the Future of Transportation, first given at Mobile Utopia in Lancaster and also appearing as a visual essay in Makery.info here
I’m in a panel called Hybrid Ontologies and quite appropriately I am speaking alongside the Department of Seaweed, a project by Julia Lohhman. She set up this as a playful intervention intervention into the museum structure at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The conference is quite an informal setting. On the last day, we abandoned the formal conference routines and made a collective performance led by artist duskin drum. You can see tweets from the conference here.
At the conference there was also an update on the ongoing trans-European Frontiers in Retreat project, given by Taru Elfving, artist Bartaku and others.You can read a review of the conference in Makery.info just pubished in French here. Click on EN for English.
While in the conference I also visited the brand new Biofilia Lab – Base for Biological Arts – the first dedicated and equipped biological art lab in an art school. Here Lab Manager Marika Hellman (left) is showing conference participants including artist Margherita Pevere (centre) some genetically- modifed tobacco being analysed by schoolchildren.
There was some interesting reading material lying around the lab which gave some idea of its antecedents.
Unconnected to Biofilia, but also extremely active in Helsinki, is the Finnish Bioart Society, director Erich Berger, who was also at Radical Relevances, and who I will meet later on in my residency. I attended one of their workshops after the conference where they are out on a nearby lake, collecting biological materials to construct a Winogradsky Column from pond mud and other materials, led by Kira O’Reilly. It was a beautiful day to be out and about, despite the cold wind which persists here in Finland.
Back in the lab they are mixing a witches brew of micro-organisms that they hope will become active while not smelling too much.
On the way back from the lake we encountered this extraordinary Wendy house in the grounds of a writers residency.
A few days ago it was VAPPU, the uniquely Finnish celebration of the day before Mayday, when everyone wears these white student caps and goes a bit wild. Here are some revellers on artist Tapio Makela’s sea-club boat, Merikerho on Vappu night.
Listen to My Techno Weighs a Ton, playing at Merikhero here
Just behind the club is one of the two coal-fired power stations here in Helsinki, with an enormous pile of coal. Normally these places are outside cities but here they are right downtown.
This inspired the artist group HeHe to famously project a responsive green laser beam on the Salisaari power station’s emissions, varying according to Helsinki’s power consumption, exactly 10 years before my visit, during the 2008 Pixelache festival, also curated by Juha Huuskonen, in Green Cloud or Nuage Vert
There are many interesting artists here right now. Rintaro Hara (below), another HIAP resident, has just closed his exhibition ‘Ascending and Descending’, which features small spheres, a bit like planets, circulating the gallery powered simply by gravity, at Forum Box Gallery. You can see the video here.
I also met Axel Straschnoy, an artist from Buenos Aires based here, who showed me his attempt to meet the challenge of designing performance art by robots for robots. He is currently collaborating with a group of Finnish Amateur Rocketeers
Minna Langstrom showed me rushes of her new film about Mars Rover drivers and the way in which imagery of the Mars landscape challenges our thinking not only about photography but also the way in which our human senses are extended into the spacecraft and rovers operating on another planet, through the personal viewpoint of a rover driver Vandi Verma (below) who helped build and now operates the NASA Curiosity rover.
First time to the beautiful Kiasma building, where everyone has told me I should see Karel Koplimets’ ‘Case No. 13. Waiting For The Ship Of Empties’, an Estonian artist who collected cut-price Estonian beer cans via social media to construct a catamaran and sail them back to Estonia. It’s a great idea, although it’s a pity such a dynamic project is reduced to a static museum object. It’s part of a selection of recent works from the Baltic called There and Back Again.
This is just two doors down from my studio here in Suomenlinna!
It’s an indoor growing lab by Raimo Saarinen, who is doing a one-year residency at HIAP. He is growing these extraordinary and enormous suspended plants which can be seen along with their entire root structure. When I ask him how he does this he shows me the large mould in which he starts these plants growth, which he keeps at the entrance to his studio.
Back on the mainland, in the Cable Factory, I visit another HIAP artist Sejin Kim, from S. Korea whose ‘Night Worker’ focuses on the hidden lives of city dwellers and labour. It is an interesting co-incidence that her studio is facing the actual power station chimneys used by HeHe in ‘Green Cloud’. Here, she is making a new work about nomadic Sami people whose traditional tent-pitching places are being attacked by local authorities, even to the extent of setting them on fire.
Helsinki, traditionally isolated, has now become an important crossroads between Europe and Asia. Passing through town is Taiwanese curator Hung-Fei Wu, founder and curator of Nature More, ‘an enquiry into the intersections of art and ecology’. the title taken from the Byron poem ‘I love not Man but Nature more’. We have an interesting conversation about Taiwan, the work of Nature More, the exhibition I curated there (see bio below) and the Bamboo Curtain project.
Titanik Gallery, on the River Aura
Off to Turku to meet curators, artists and investigate the River Aura. First stop Titanik Gallery to see the exhibition, including enormous heavy pillars of salt by Kristina Sedlerova, and meet newly-appointed Director Elina Suoyrjo who has also been a visiting curator at HIAP, and hear about the gallery’s future plans. Later I meet artist in residence Denton Fredrikson and we discuss Cixin Lui’s Three Body Problem trilogy, which we have both read, him during a recent residency in Shanghai. Then off up the river to check out some kayaks for a performance with Leena Kela, artist (below left) who is doing a one woman, one year daily ‘protest’ performance project as well being Director of New Turku Performance and running an artists residency programme.
We go to meet Kari Immonen, Director of Turku Art Museum, an extraordinary ‘National Romantic’ edifice on a hill. It’s an unusually warm day in Turku, when used to the cold winds of Helsinki.
As well as having a great conversation about artist-sailors in Finland, the very-helpful Kari directs us to the difficult-to-find Turku Rowing Club, on the Baltic Sea. Visiting rowing clubs and thinking about how to combine art and rowing is one of my missions here so I am very happy to find this place.
Here, we encounter the very different world of rowing clubs and speak to a rower who has just come in from a beautiful scull on an almost mirror-smooth Baltic sea. I realise, only now, that there is no tide in the Baltic! I have been travelling on it every day, and never noticed. There are 3 rowing clubs in one here, I am hoping to come back and scull with one of them.
We go and look at a potential place for a performance on the River Aura and travel backwards and forwards discussing logistics on this amazing hundred-year old city ferry, a symbol of Turku, which used to carry dock workers back and forth.
A great visit and thanks to all my friends and new friends in Turku.
Off to Vitvy to visit Tapio Makela and his upcoming Future Lake Residency on this lake. This will be a unique interdisciplinary international research residency and probably one of the few to be founded by an active artist.
Residents will have an entire forest and lake to interact with. I hope to be able to row some kind of vehicle, maybe a locally sourced single scull, sometime in the future, or even build an new purpose-built vehicle with local boatbuilders. Time to get my proposal in!
Tapio (below) recently bought this amazingly vast former old peoples home from the municipality at a reduced price. It could host 20- 30 artists or a mini-conference, when the work (and there is a lot) is finished on the project.
Back in the Helsinki area I seek out the second ever Futuro House, designed by Matti Suuronen, to be built, hiding behind EMMA, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art. It was closed to the public the day I visited, so I had to clamber down the hillside behind the museum to get this shot. This Futuro house opened the day before I leave, so you can now visit it here.
Out to visit the studio of Antti Laitinen, the inspirational Finnish artist famous for a number of things including living in a forest naked bringing nothing and trying to survive for 4 days, eating and clothing himself only with natural found materials. He’s also famous for ‘It’s My island’ and ‘Voyage’ where he rowed his own island, complete with palm tree, across the Baltic and even up the River Thames in London.
Here is one of his ‘Broken Landscapes’ on the land out of the back of his studio.
Here is an unfinished work in his garden, experimenting with forced growth of plants.
Later we swim in a local lake. It’s my first dip in Finnish water and pretty cold temperatures, but I survive. It’s good to be close to the water.
So what am I doing here? I’m researching and thinking about a new exhibition/event/research project, codenamed ‘Close to the Water’ trying to process the multiplicity of artists floating projects – artists working on the water and building boats, rafts, rowing and sailing – and form some sort of coherent strategy for a future where rising water levels and moving populations will quite likely dominate the way we live. I have written a visual essay for Makery. info called ‘Artists On The Water’ here. Hopefully the point of such a residency is to question previous thinking on the subject and similar to my previous picture from Biofilia, here are a selection of books I am reading and re-reading, piled up in my studio overlooking the Baltic sea. Thanks to Juha Huuskonen and his team from HIAP and Taru Elfving from Frame for getting me here…
Thanks also to Jaakko Nousianen of the Finnish institute in London for his advice in advance of my visit.
Bye bye Suomenlinna and Helsinki! Looking forward to coming back soon…
BIO
Opening of No Such Thing As Gravity, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Taiwan
Rob La Frenais is an independent contemporary art curator, working internationally and creatively with artists entirely on original commissions. He believes in being directly engaged with the artist’s working process as far as possible, while actively widening the context within which the artist can work.
From 1997 for 17 years he was based at The Arts Catalyst where he developed an ambitious artistic programme and was responsible for some of the most innovative art and science exhibitions and events in the world. His last major exhibition with The Arts Catalyst, Republic of the Moon, happened in 2013-14 at FACT and London’s South Bank. Since leaving The Arts Catalyst he has curated several major projects and his recent work can be seen in Current Projects above.
Tania Candiani’s sound sculpture for listening – Exoplanet Lot 2016. Photo Yohann Gozard.
Before becoming a curator in 1987 he founded and edited the influential contemporary cultural journal Performance Magazine in 1979, editing and writing criticism internationally during the eighties. He is currently developing a contemporary project and website about Performance Magazine with Live Art Development Agency.
He was also the first curator ever to experience zero gravity, with a group of artists, at Star City in Moscow in 1999 and went on, with the Arts Catalyst to enable around 50 artists (and scientists) to work in an environment previously only experienced by astronauts and space scientists.
In White Sands Desert launching Thomas Saraceno’s ‘Aerocene’, the first human solar balloon. See the video here
His recent exhibitions as an independent curator (2014-16) include: Aerosolar/Space Without Rockets and ‘Aerocene’ by Tomas Saraceno at the Rubin Center, University of Texas at El Paso and White Sands Desert, New Mexico, When the Future was About Fracking, Centrespace at Dundee Contemporary Arts, and Exoplanet Lot, Maison Des Arts Georges Pompidou, France and sites thoughout the Lot Valley, SW France.
He is a visiting fellow of Bournemouth University, visiting curator at the Maison Des Arts Georges Pompidou, Cajarc, France and visiting curator at FACT Liverpool. He runs the 3-year Future of Transportation project at Srishti Institute, Bangalore. He is a regular writer for Art Monthly, UK and Makery.info. France.
HeHe’s ‘Centipede’ running on the railway line between Cahors and Cajarc in ‘Exoplanet Lot’ 2016.
His last major exhibition ‘No Such Thing As Gravity, opened at FACT Liverpool in November 2016 and toured to the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art where it will ran until June 2017.
Still from ‘Time You Need’ by Sarah Sparkes who made a new work for ‘No Such Thing as Gravity’
The magazine Rob founded in 1979 and edited until 1987, Performance Magazine, has launched online. Read all the back issues, read the essays and see four films about the magazine here: