Andreas Engman


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mail: andreas.engman@agitera.com
cell: +46(0)704155739

Studio / Public platform:
Harald Stakegatan 2, 415 15 GBG

Andreas Engman is an artist, educator and former chef working and living in Gothenburg. Engman’s artistic practice1 is, through a conceptual approach, invested in different modes of institutional critique and alternative pedagogical frameworks, which often takes the shape of installations, performances and discursive events. Turning towards the performative and the corporeal he’s interested in how expanded notions of institutional critique can be formed in the intersection of feminist pedagogies, affective strategies and the politics of food. His past experience as a professional chef informs the conceptual and political aspects of his work with food cultures with material knowledge and practical skills.

Further investigations into the many political, aesthetic and affective intersections of art and food is performed through the collaborative platform AFTERWORKS together with artists Rose Brander and Kjell Caminha.

As a continuation of his long-standing interest in the fabric of institutions through their structures, attitudes and ecologies, Engman initiated the artist-run platform Temporary Stabilisations together with artist Annie Johansson. Temporary Stabilisations can be seen as yet another vehicle and strategy to explore expanded practices tied to “the institutional”. The aim for this practice-based-research project has been to establish a space to gain further insights into the complex ecologies of institutions. The space functions as a studio and a public transdisciplinary platform for contemporary art and related practices, situated in a former convenient store in Gamlestan in Gothenburg, Sweden.


In collaboration with with Kjell Caminha, MC Coble and Jeuno Kim he also forms the group Public* Display* of Actions*. P*D*A* is an anti-fascist platform using performance and speech tactics from street and guerilla theater, agitprop, Speakers' Corners, and political assemblies, to initiate contexts for collective experience and demonstration. How can the visual and performative literacy of art be shared and used collectively among artists, activists, researchers and the general public to navigate the swiftly changing social and political climate in a time when white power and institutional violence are gathering in the wake of political instability driven by post-factual politics, white fragility and entitlement?

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1 Index:
Selected Works
(scroll page or click in menue for specific works)















Current & Upcoming:

* Recovery Drink!
Undrar om hästar sjunger blues
* Huvudgata, park, träd och sten:  
   En meditation över Västlänken och station Haga genom ljud, text, performance och objekt
* Who Gets In? Rethinking Admissons – Confronting Segregation
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Act 12: The Pentathlon
* Utgrävningar: Småland - Kansas och tillbaks igen
* Temporary Stabilisations
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Act 11: The Musical
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Acts 7-10: The Mixtapes
* Dance Armstrong and the Log Sessions
* Eating Venice: Lagoon Legumes, Ceremony & Heritage
* Dicks Revisited
* Radical Empathy: A Continuous Score, Acts 4-6: Remix
* The Institute for Potentiality & Actualization: “Taxidermy of Speculative Gestures – a 21-day Conference”
* Let’s Mobilize! What is Feminist pedagogy?
*
A Stockholm Syndrome
* Assemblage: Dicks Revisited
* A Line Made by Swimming
* Between Symbolic Acts, Environmental Qualities & Human Sensibilities

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The project Food Journeys - Att dela historier över kulturgränser genom konst och mat has received funding from Boråsregionen for a one year preliminary study. Together with Nathan Clydesdale & Rachel Barron @ Ljurhalla Fabriken 2023/2024

Recovery Drink! at Galleri Gamla Farsot, 9 - 11 August 2024

A Sour Place: Embodied Metabolisms and Fermented Narratives, performance @ Skogen, 18-19th October.

Durational Space # 5 at Lilith Performance Studios, 21 November - 7 December together with  Roxy Farhat, Salad Hilowle, Elias Björn and Josefina Björk.



(fermentation)


Recovery Drink!

Galleri Gamla Farsot
(2024)



Recovery Drink! is the first act in a series of upcoming works where I will look into the performative aspects of lacto-fermentation. The work assembles through an associative process a mix of sound, metabolisms, objects, and performances. I see exhibitions as uncertain sites for experimentation and tools for discovering things I don’t already know, both about a specific subject and my artistic process. The results are often inconclusive, open-ended, and unresolved, but meaningful for understanding where to go next.

When I started to engage with fermentation, I instantly got immersed in microbiology and its complex histories and recent groundbreaking revelations. A rich volume of recent research has pointed out how a bacterially diverse microbiome is fundamental for our thriving as a species. One example of this is the important gut-brain axis which connects microbial health in the gut with mental wellbeing.

Lactobacillus Acidophilus are acid-loving milk bacteria and instrumental in the lacto-fermentation of food and beverages, they also play a pivotal role in several beneficial microbial processes in the body. They have an antagonistic effect on the Salmonella and Staphylococcus bacteria and they are fundamental to maintaining a healthy and stable vaginal flora for example. Both the L. Acidophilus bacteria and the process of lacto-fermentation are fascinating in their capacity to bring a wide range of seemingly disparate topics in close proximity to each other. Some intersections are less straightforward than others like let’s say, pickled cucumbers and vaginal health or kombucha and anaerobic physical exercise.

Consuming probiotics like L. Acidophilus has been a go-to for gastrointestinal health for ages. Still, new research in the field shows how what we eat interacts with the complex microbial assemblages that constitute the porous human body. The oftentimes problematic truism of “you are what you eat” has in this light taken on a more complex meaning. It’s not only in the realm of the natural sciences that microbial performativity is being unpicked and scrutinized. The concept of fermentation is rich in metaphor and a wide range of thinkers use fermentation and microbial co-habitation for new political imaginaries. Microbiology generally, and fermentation specifically, entangles a wide range of concepts in diverse fields such as metaphor in philosophy, political theory, sports medicine, international relations studies, and gastronomy only to name a few. Across these fields new paths of understanding microbial co-habitation question old-fashioned views on the relation between, pathogen and host, community and Other, illegal immigrant and nation-state, and contaminated vs. clean for example.

The exhibition Recovery Drink! takes as its point of departure the history of microbiology by looking at anthropologist and biologist César E. Giraldo Herrera’s claim that the field of microbiology and how we understand it today is heavily formed by shamanism, pre-contact Amerindian indigenous, knowledge practices. Along these lines, Giraldo Herrera points out that shamanism has more in common with microbiology than spirits and souls and says: ”Europeans dismissed the epistemology of shamans and described their experiences as the result of delusions derived from the malfunction of the brain induced by mind-altering substances”.
1 Eurocentric misinterpretations like these were made by monks and missionaries in the history of colonialism. When engaging with microbiology and fermentation it’s hard to look past claims like Giraldo Hererras knowing that colonization practices around the world have used and are using epistemicide (the annihilation of knowledge) as its modus operandi.

In Recovery Drink! I wrestle with some of these topics conceptually and materially in a staged setting where words and worlds become entangled, and meaning is unstable.



(Access the sound work here!)


1 César E. Giraldo Herrera. Microbes and Other Shamanic Beings. (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2018)












































































































Works

The Cucuscle, 2024
Styrofoam, cucumber, fruit flies and postcard with illustration by Utagawa Kunisada (1786-1864)


Musclecumbers, 2024
Cutting board, acrylic glass and collage


You Are What You Eat, 2024
High protein, low fat bar


Accelerationist Vaginal Flora, 2024
Fermentation jar, lacto-fermented peaches and 10 speed vibrating veggie


What Does It Mean To Recover, 2024
Risoprinted posters


The Gut-Brain Axis, 2024
Fiber-glass, heat shrink tubing


The Shamanic Microbes Sports Bar, 2024
Performance, pickle juice flavored recovery ferment, installation, sound






(assemblage)



Undrar om hästar
sjunger blues


(2023)


In the work UNDRAR OM HÄSTAR SJUNGER BLUES Klas Trollius and Andreas Engman reflect on situations when communication breaks down or when a rift occurs in the relation between image, hearing, sight and language. Trollius and Engman have collected material from communicative encounters between the human and the more-than-human, and from situations of translation, misunderstanding and mishearing. The audience follows a number of scenes of a ceremonial nature, where the soundscape claims the centre stage.

The work can be seen as an exploration into camp aesthetics and logic where Trollius and Engman deploys two main protagonists to guide the audience through a series of elusive rituals. One of the characters is a horse figure that borrows its appearance from Jean Cocteau’s film from 1960, Testament of Orpheus and the other is an ambiguous master of ceremonies, a mystical envoy – aka ’The Messenger’. Embedded in the soundscapes the protagonists unfold a non-linear, broken narrative that moves across registers of absurdity, overambitiousness, humour, seriousness and failure, in a series of spatial tableauxs for you to project your daydreams onto.

Trollius and Engman creates an assemblage of sound, text, scenography and performance, insisting on a non-hierarchy between the different elements of the work.


Sound and text: Klas Trollius & Andreas Engman
Scenography: Klas Trollius & Andreas Engman
Choreography: Klas Trollius & Andreas Engman
Costume: Klas Trollius & Andreas Engman
Light design: Fabian Roos, Klas Trollius & Andreas Engman

Duration: 60 min.

Premiered at Skogen, Gothenburg in May 2023.