Electronic Flora – Book launch and concert with Lerin/Hystad
26 March
15.00–20.00
Top floor
Free admission but pre-registration required. Send your registration to frontdesk@fargfabriken.se
Färgfabriken’s café will be open
Welcome to a book launch and concert at Färgfabriken with Lerin/Hystad, Giovanni Aloi, Michael Marder and Art & Theory Publishing.
The publication Electronic flora by Lerin/Hystad documents the duo’s meetings with more than a hundred different plants through detailed graphite drawings, texts and music.
Although plants are sessile organisms, they continuously explore their surroundings. Plants consist of different internal and external networks that intertwine them with their environments. By going out and meeting plants in their own environments Lerin/Hystad tries to counteract their own plant blindness. The duo records electrical data from plants that are translated into sounds through sonification – the notes, melodies and rhythms of the music are determined by the plants themselves. Yet plants are nestled among countless other organisms, and when the duo place their sensors on the leaves to capture a moment’s electric activity, they do not just capture the plants but also all the threads from the ecological weave in which they are entangled.
Through various residency programs, Electronic flora has taken the duo to Norway, Spain, Switzerland, and India, as well as several places in Sweden. In the publication Lerin/Hystad shares some of the experiences they have had through travelogues on their excursions. The book also includes ten new essays from artists, philosophers, art scholars and biologists giving their unique perspective on the duo’s artwork and vegetal being. Contributors include Timothy Morton, Emanuele Coccia, Giovanni Aloi, Michael Marder, Brandon LaBelle, Lars Lerin, Suresh Jayaram, Nadia Bensbih, Mats Karström, and Elisabet Yanagisawa.
Electronic flora is released through Art & Theory Publishing and for the book launch the duo has invited author and curator Giovanni Aloi and philosopher Michael Marder who will each give a lecture. Lerin/Hystad will, through an improvised concert, perform the book Electronic flora together with plants, sensors and synthesizers. During two acts, the duo will guide the listener through a literary and musical journey into vegetal being.
Read more about the book Electronic Flora here.
Programme
15:00: Welcome and introduction
15:30: Lecture with Giovanni Aloi
16:30: Concert with Lerin/Hystad, Act 1.
17:15: Lecture with Michael Marder
18:00: Panel discussion with Lerin/Hystad, Giovanni Aloi and Michael Marder.
18:30: Concert with Lerin/Hystad, Act 2.
The programme is preliminary and can be changed.
Lerin/Hystad
Artist duo Lerin/Hystad comprises Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad. Since 2010, they have been working together in the borderlands between visual art and experimental music. Lerin/Hystad have studied at the University of Arts, Craft and Design and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm as well as at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in Norway.
During the spring of 2024 they were artists in residence in Stockholm as part of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s IASPIS programme. The duo’s work has recently been exhibited at Konsthall C (Stockholm, 2024), Atletika Gallery (Vilnius, 2024), Naturkulturreservatet Marhult, the Småland Triennial (2023), Härke Konstcentrum (Östersund, 2023), Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter (Molde, 2023), NAIRS Contemporary Art Center, (Scuol, 2019), and Värmlands Museum (Karlstad, 2019). Lerin/Hystad are also active musicians and have toured Europe, China, and Japan.
Read more about Lerin/Hystad here.
Giovanni Aloi
Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, educator, and maker specializing in the histories of art and politics of aesthetics in representations of nature in art. He’s the founder and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and US Correspondent for Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion.
Aloi is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series Art after Nature, and has authored four books including Why Look at Plants? – The Vegetal World in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019) and the forthcoming Vegetal Entwinements (2023) co-edited with Michael Marder, Estado Vegetal (2023), Botanical Revolutions (2025), and Lawn (2025). He lectures at museums and universities internationally and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at Queen Mary University of London, Goldsmiths, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in London and New York. He received his Ph.D. in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries.
Michael Marder
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020), Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel’s Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024). For more information, visit his website.