Andreas Engman


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

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


I'm an artist, educator, and former chef living and working in Gothenburg. My artistic practice is rooted in a conceptual and research-driven methodology. A long-standing interest in my work is investigating the many productive entanglements formed in the intersection of institutional critique, political philosophy, politics of food, and performance practices. My works are associative, open-ended assemblages that often meet the public through installations, performances, and soundscapes. I frequently seek counter-rational strategies and speculative forms of meaning-making when producing work. I'm interested in how metaphor can open up speculative reframings and new interpretations of a specific subject. And how to practice methods of cross-pollination to try to see things in a new light by borrowing the specificities from one field of study to contaminate old customs in the crossover between subjects and new ways of knowing. My experience as a professional chef offers material knowledge and practical skills to my work on food and commensality.

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

Continuing my deep interest in the fabric of institutions through their structures, attitudes, and ecologies, I initiated the artist-run platform Temporary Stabilisations with artist Annie Johansson. Temporary Stabilisations can be seen as another vehicle and strategy to explore expanded practices tied to "the institutional." This practice-based research project aims to establish a space to gain further insights into the complex ecologies of institutions. The space is a studio and a public transdisciplinary platform for contemporary art and related practices, situated in a former convenience store in Gamlestan in Gothenburg, Sweden.

In collaboration with Kjell Caminha, MC Coble, and Jeuno Kim, I also formed 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:

* Corpus Politicum: A Lively Vessel
* A Sour Place: Embodied Metabolisms and Fermented Narratives

* 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

~

Upcoming:
The Omnivore’s Paradox:
Critical Mouthfeel of Institutions (The Admission)   
@ Skogen, November 2025


Recently:
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.

Corpus Politicum: A Lively Vessel as part of Durational Space # 5 at Lilith Performance Studios, 21 November - 7 December together with Roxy Farhat, Elias Björn, Josefina Björk, Dsplcd Vsn; Salad Hilowle + Jean Pedro Fabra Guemberena feat. Jean-Louis Huhta.  Get tickets here!





Corpus Politicum:
 A Lively Vessel


Performed as part of Durational Space #5 
at LILITH PERFORMANCE STUDIO, 2024











Duration: 3 hours

Performance: Andreas Engman / Recovery Drink: Andreas Engman / Sound: Andreas Engman / Costume: Annie Johansson / Textile Sculpture: Annie Johansson & Andreas Engman / Scenography: Andreas Engman, Petter Pettersson & Lo Pettersson-Lundgren / Light Design: Lo Pettersson-Lundgren & Andreas Engman / Photography: Petter Pettersson

(Access the sound work HERE!
)



In this final act of three on lacto-fermentation, I gaze more toward the body than in previous installments. Performative and metaphorical aspects of lactic acid production are met in Corpus Politicum, The Body Politic, a direction in political philosophy where the body is used as a metaphor for the sovereign nation-state or other institutions in society (see social organism and social body). Further examples are when an organization such as the UN refers to its various decision-making bodies; about nations, one speaks of heads of state, and in ancient times, political crises were often equated with a biological disease. The 17th-century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), in his book Leviathan or The Matter, Form, and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651), describes parts of the state/body as follows; 'sovereignty is the soul, and magistrates are the body's the joints, reward and punishment, its nerves. Money is the blood providing nutrients from the plenty of nature.'

The Body Politic has long been one of the most widely used metaphors for states and institutions in political discourse. Although it is also commonly used today, many people problematize its historical and contemporary effects on how we view our environment and who and what populates it. Historically, a form of immunological discourse has shaped our view of society and who is described as pathogenic or apatogenic in the state-body relation, who or what is dangerous and who or what is beneficial. A form of antiseptic relationship to what is considered foreign under prevailing norms. Something that feels more relevant than ever in today's protectionist society. In her book, The Microbial State - Global Thriving and the Body Politic, Professor of Political Theory Stefanie R. Fishel argues that climate change, neoliberalism, mass migration, and other aspects of the late Anthropocene have increasingly highlighted the limitations of this metaphor. Just as the human body is not whole and separate from other bodies but is made up of microbes, bacteria, water, and radioactive isotopes - she argues that the body politic of the state exists in a dense entanglement with other communities and forms of life. Reframing the concept of the body politic to accommodate more significant levels of complexity, Fishel suggests, will result in new configurations for the political and social organization necessary to build a world where the planet's inhabitants do not merely live but actively thrive.
















































Research in microbiology is problematizing the traditional idea of the body as clearly defined and is complicating what it means to be human. This is because we are primarily made up of beneficial and pathogenic bacteria. In terms of our bodily composition, non-human DNA outnumbers human DNA. The human body's largest population of microorganisms is found in the gut. It is called the gut microbiota, where trillions of microorganisms coexist and its microbiome can contain 1000 times more "non-human" genes than human. This challenges the idea of humans as sovereign beings and proposes them instead as a traveling assemblage of microorganisms, a 'lively vessel,' in constant flux through our bodily porous and leaky boundaries with our bacterial environment.

In the space at Lilith Performance Studio, there is a fridge where the recovery drink 'The Lively Vessel' is served from red sports bottles. The drink consists of kombucha, beetroot juice, and red grapefruit juice and thus contains millions of lively lactic acid bacteria. Through the constant production of lactic acid, the drink and the body in the room are in an ongoing, simultaneous fermentation process. As a visitor, you are welcome to have a sports bottle and allow yourself to be recuperated by embodying the lively vessel and welcoming microbial coexistence. In Corpus Politicum: A Lively Vessel, I ask how we can metaphorically look at fermentation in general and lactic acid in particular wrapped up in this state-body relationship?








































A Sour Place:
Embodied Metabolisms &
Fermented Narratives

Performed at SKOGEN, 2024


A Sour Place: Embodied Metabolisms and Fermented Narratives is a performative investigation of lactic acid production across different worlds. The work is presented as a durational performance installation in collaboration with DJ and artist Jamie Hudson, who is composing and remixing live soundscapes for the piece's duration.  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. When you work them hard and fast, a type of anaerobic respiration is carried out by the L. Acidophilus bacteria and your own muscle cells. That an identical chemical process can occur in these different contexts, in our muscles, and in a pickle jar(!), opens up thoughts about bio-political aspects of non-anthropocentric relations between human and more-than-human spaces.


DJ:
Jamie Hudson / Recovery Drink: Kristin Bergman & Andreas Engman / Costume: Annie Johansson / Scenography: Annie Johansson & Andreas Engman / Light Design: Fabian Roos & Andreas Engman / Performance: Andreas Engman / Photography: Hendrik Zeitler

Duration: 3 hours

(Listen to the DJ set from day 1 HERE!)


























































































































































































































































































































The installation incorporates the following works:

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

The Harness and The Leaky Vessel, 2024
Jacket made out of handwoven fabric (metal thread and mercerized cotton), harness

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


Shamanic Microbes, 2024
pickle juice flavored recovery ferment

Well, We're In a Real Pickle Now You and Me, 2024
Punching bag, metal chain, textile









(fermentation)


Recovery Drink!

Galleri Gamla Farsot
(2024)



Recovery Drink! is the first act in a series of upcoming works in which I will examine 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 know 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 crucial gut-brain axis, which connects microbial health in the gut to mental well-being. 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. The L. Acidophilus bacteria and the process of lacto-fermentation are fascinating in their capacity to bring a wide range of seemingly disparate topics close 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 our food interacts with the complex microbial assemblages that constitute the porous human body. In this light, the oftentimes problematic truism of “you are what you eat” has 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 to create 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 worldwide 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