Areyouready.tv

As part of the online project Nature as Infrastructure by The Winter Office.

Are You Ready? is a new video series by the Danish artist Frans Jacobi and Norwegian artist Gitte Sætre. The project revolves around the investigation of a dead tree from the Norwegian woods. Known as The Living Unliving Surveillance Poet, the dead tree investigates the human relationship to the natural world, and at each full moon reports its findings back to nature. In this way, the Surveillance Poet seeks to encourage humans to approach the climate crisis by reflecting on how to create sustainable situations that can lead to renewed ecological balance.

Are You Ready? interrogates how art can influence our thinking about important political and environmental issues and contribute to initiating real change.

In this preamble to AREYOUREADY.TV, Frans Jacobi and Gitte Sætre tell stories about The Living Unliving Surveillance Poet, the TV series origins, and each artist speaks or introduces their own practices and the background of creative activity leading to this collaboration.

This video was specially commissioned as part of Nature as Infrastructure: A proposition by The Winter Office and as part of a cross-institutional collaboration between SixtyEight Art Institute, Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, University of Bergen Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, and supported by NBK, City of Bergen, Creative Europe, Danish Arts Foundation, Arts Council of Norway and others to develop the AREYOUREADY.TV Episodes and Broadcasting Platform.

The preamble to the series and Episode 1, Resurrection, 23’, 2020, are available online from November 30 to December 5, 2020.

Gitte Sætre is a multidisciplinary artist, living and working in Bergen. Gitte Sætre’s oeuvre deals with current issues, such as climate change, neoliberalism, and cultural radicalism. Her body of work is characterized by the weight of contemporary society, yet makes room for humour and quiet reflection. Previous projects include Woman Cleaning (2014-2019), The Soups&Stories Project (2014-2017), Magic of Seven (2016) and The Green Hijab Movement (2014-2019). 

Frans Jacobi is a visual artist, living and working between Copenhagen and Bergen. He works with performance, text and images. His art addresses today’s political crises, seen through dark poetic humor. In 2015 he started the ongoing research-project Synsmaskinen and in 2017, he and Gitte Sætre initiated Green Hijab Movement. Jacobi is Professor of Time-based Art and Head of Department at the Art Academy - Institute of Contemporary Art, KMD/UiB, Bergen.

The Living Unliving Surveillance Poet (r-b. 2020) is a dead tree. They opened PAB Carbon Reflections Festival with a speech, and by 2020 the Surveillance Poet will have been investigating what humanity entails. They are participating in The Latent City at BEK/Bergen Kjøtt, November 2020 with the performative chant: “Yesterday and today the energy in the cosmos is extremely intensive (especially yesterday) to the point that it’s affecting our physical body, so”.