Rut Karin Zettergren and Olando Whyte

The time at the Saari Residence is intended to deepen methods and ideas from the art project “Owning Our Madness”*, started in 2023 — grief that becomes transformative, anger that becomes material, madness that becomes method, art that becomes solace. In performances combining video and neurotechnology, Zettergren’s feminist, critical perspective on technology and power meets Whyte’s work in choreography and ritual as resistance.

During the residency, Rut Karin will focus on experimenting with and developing “empathy tools,” a technology in which neural data from a dancing body, via EEG and EKG, is used to create transformation and glitches in video that records the heat of the performer’s body. The work with the heat camera stems from Rut Karin’s investigations into how infrared technology, which carries a clear military and surveillance legacy, can be turned from a violent way of perceiving the heat of a body as a target into a tool for empathy with a living being.

Olando’s choreographic contribution will draw on two strands of Jamaican performance tradition: war-style dancehall dance and Afro-Jamaican healing rituals, both ways of processing the ongoing history of colonial violence, grief and resistance through the body. In this process, the aim is to examine how a dancer’s bodily and emotional experience can be translated, enhanced and transformed through technology that registers signals and heat otherwise invisible to humans.

At Saari, the hope is to find time for both reflection and experimentation, and to gain new perspectives from the residency program and felow resident artists to help develop the work further. As Saari is surrounded by forest, the aim is also to test the performance tools outdoors, exploring whether they can extend to examine grief and rage caused by climate change, and foster empathy with the non-human.

* The title “Owning Our Madness” pays homage to Jamaican psychiatrist Frederick W. Hickling‘s lecture of the same name (SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2020)

Whyte&Zettergren is an artistic duo comprising Jamaican dancer and performance artist Olando Whyte and Swedish visual artist Rut Karin Zettergren. The duo’s works constitute an ongoing investigation of places, materials, and bodies as bearers of historical memory. In their works, Zettergren’s speculative technofeminism and Whyte’s ritual Yaadfuturism intersect practices that reshape futures in multiple ways: through a Nordic intersectional feminist and technocritical lens, and through the experimental remixing of history, ritual, and rhythm in Jamaican dance culture.