UNDER 1.0 (2021)


UNDER is a site-specific solar powered sound installation and a community project involving hiking, cooking, listening and camping together that took place in the nature area of Florarna in Norra Uppland, during 2020-2022. 


The work and project was created in collaboration with the nature guide, Stefan Skoglund, the biologist, Marie Kvarnström and Konstfrämjandet Uppland within the interregional project Skogen Mellan Oss.

 

The work is based on the artist Jenny Sunesson’s personal survey of Florarna nature area and reserve, which is located near her own home in Örbyhus.

 

For almost a year, and during somewhat stressful conditions, Jenny explored the subterranean sound world of Florarna using contact microphones dependent on power from portable solar panels.

 

During this process, Sunesson challenges her own relation to the forest and her constant objectification of it while recording.

 

However, it soon becomes obvious that the strict, solar-powered work process might not be the solution to her urge to control the forest and its biology.

 

Instead, it is during the unsentimental struggle, the mosquito-filled sweaty, stinging process and the uneasy interactions that glimpses of consensus and reciprocity between forest, machine and human appear.

 

UNDER is part of a series of auto-ethnographical works.



UNDER 2.0 (2022)


During the work with UNDER in 2020 and 2021 Jenny concentrated her work on three focus areas of Florarna; clear-cut areas, protected areas (nature reserve) and pine plantation.


The original location for the installation was in a middle of an old, densly planted plantation where Jenny developed the work according to its specific, unique acoustic properties.


When the installation was to be exhibited the second round, in 2022, the plantation had been cut and was no longer recognisable.


After long delibaration the decision was made to move the installation and the work had to re-adjusted in order to its new, sonic site.





 

CLICK TO LISTEN  >>>  UNDER at Naturmorgon, May 2022

 

JENNY SUNESSON

SOLAR SONIC COMMUNITIES

SOLAR SONIC COMMUNITIES is an attempt to get away from the anthropocentric idea of nature and instead approach the forest according to its own time and rhythm.

 

By following the forest's own body clock based on the sun's rays and movements, the sounding interior of the forest's may be explored.

 

In recent years, I have increasingly begun to challenge myself in my work by using various forms of live processes with a focus on intuition, chance and collectivity to break established narrative patterns, find untrodden paths and hidden tracks.

 

What happens when "the tape is not on", in overlaps and gaps, is something that I constantly return to in my practice and which engages me the most right now.

HYMN FOR A DE_HYDRATED SPRUCE

4-channel sound installation for water towers

2019


Hymn for a De_hydrated spruce is the first piece in the SOLAR SONIC COMMUNITIES SERIES. It is a live work that I started working on in 2019.


The work is a kind of study of drought and the effects of drought on the spruce habitat.  

It is based on a specific spruce that stands on the edge of my forest plot.  


The work began after the spruce's physical reaction after the dry summer of 2018; it began to produce a huge amount of pine cones.

The spruce simply believed that it would die of dehydration and gathered its last strength to reproduce. I began to study the trees' intricate communication systems to better understand how trees respond to drought. The sound work explores an inner journey inside a thirsty spruce. It is based on scientific recordings and my own field recordings and close examination of and listening to the textures and sonic capacities of the organic materials  in the dry nature.  

The process led on to the work with UNDER.   


Listen to a short version of Hymn for a De_hydrated spruce, re-worked for the Art pod Phosphenes ion Spotify.