“To understand existential health and resilience through an artistic practice.

An artistic practice that works specifically with the sensuous and poetic.

Behind me photos from our recent large-scale, long-term durational performance-art piece Sisters Hope Home is showing. It shows images of the space and what we term in-situ data donated  to our Archive from participants, or inhabitants as we call them.

All our practice takes its starting point in a manifest written in 2008 as a response to the financial crisis of the time and as a response to the on-going ecological crisis. And it can be perceived as a response to any sort of crisis – not at least thinking of the poly-crisis that we are facing today.

The manifest suggests a potential future world that has moved beyond economic rationality and instead is governed by the aesthetic dimension. The sensuous and poetic.

Joseph Campbell has a wonderful image where he uses a city-scape to exemplify how the governing paradigm of society historically has changed many times before – So, narrowed down to this part of the world; Roughly – from the antique up until the Enligtenment the churches are the tallest buildings and the religious dimension is governing, which means that everything is circling and in service of the religious dimension; Artists paint and make music for the church, the monetary system circulates around the church and if you are lucky enough to get an education you are taught by Jesuits. Then comes, in a European context, the civil wars and the city halls are build – slightly taller than the churches, and the political dimension takes over as a the governing principle and then ofcourse since the Industrial revolution, the financial centres. But of the pillars of society; religion, politics, economics – Art has not yet governed. So a Sensuous Society is one in which art is governing principle – Now image – what would such a society look like? What would the talles building be? Maybe it will not be a new tallest building, but the most organic…

This is ofcourse a speculative practice, but because our methodological outset is performance art, we do not only imagine a Sensuous Society as a thought experiment – We live it! We inhabit it during our performances, that all explores different aspects of a Sensuous Society;

In Sisters Academy we explore the school, learning and education in a Sensuous Society – We do that through takeovers at actual, real youth schools, and through constructed boarding schools where everyone can buy a ticket and enroll as students at the school of a Sensuous Society for at least 24 hours.

In Sensuous City we explore the city and public life through a 24 hour performance walk, in Sensuous Governing governing structures, and in Sisters Hope Home – A sensuous home open for inhabitants over years – domesticity and more permanent inhabitation of a Sensuous Society.

And we have begun to unpack a new exploration; White Light * Black Whole – The Healthcare System of a Sensuous Society (Sensuous healing) in collaboration with Psychiatric Centre Amager and Center of Mental Health and Art in Copenhagen.

Here new questions will be asked, and we are curiously exploring what we call The Poetic Self as a new mental ecology.

In Sisters Hope we have developed our own performance method – Sisters Performance Method – Sensuous Learning and central to this method is The Poetic Self.

The Poetic Self we understand as inherent poetic potential. So, the argument is that we all have an inner inherent poetic life that we might or might not be in touch with or unfold in everyday life.

The argument is also that access to this inner inherent poetic life stimulated by the sensuous is more or less exclusive.

This is due, to the ‘colonization’ of the art, that also happened during the enlightenment and the industrialization, where the autonomous art system was created. Also, the idea of the artist as someone with a very special transcending intelligence was conceived.

Within the art system being is based on the sensuous and poetic and there is complete freedom of expression. However, that freedom came with the price of impact.

So art and artists can be free within the system, but lost impact outside the system in society as a whole.

Also, the access to this system is not easy, and so, the sensuous and poetic modes of being became for the few, who were pointed towards this system and ‘lucky’ enough to enter it.

So, in Sisters Hope we talk about ‘democratizing the aesthetic’, by which we mean to create spaces where potentially everyone can access the sensuous and poetic.

Sisters Hope Home can be perceived as such a space for the nurturing of our inherent poetic potential.

And The Poetic Self can be perceived as a practice to nurture our inner inherent poetic potential.

When I did my artistic research PhD – Sensuous Society – Carving the Path Towards a Sustainable Future through Aesthetic Inhabitation Stimulating Ecologic Connectedness – I was, with a reading group of three, reading 800 notebooks from our Archive.

When people arrive into the universe of Sisters Hope they receive a notebook.

The notebook comes with a frontpage with few simple instructions; “This is a book to capture your dreams, streams of consciousness, reflections, explorations, drawings, longings, visions and intimate in-betweens while inhabitating…”

The the space is analogue, so upon arrival phones, tablets and also watches – we take care of time – is left in the initiation space. So, many people turn to the notebooks, instead of the phones, use it for reflections, being with own through processes and sometimes are invited to share in it after an exercise.

As I was reading the notebooks a tendency was really striking. While the theoretic inspiration for the practice was critical theory, aesthetic philosophy and participatory performance theory, I did not read into ecological theory before writing my thesis.

In ecological theory connectedness is highlighted as a key component to overcome the ecological crisis we are facing.

I first read into this with Bateson, who in 1972 wrote Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Here he emphasizes how it is ofcorse very important to create structural changes to overcome the crisis, but even more important is it that a new epistemology emerges, that is a new way of thinking about the world – And as performance artist, I would argue, that a new ontology – a new way, not only of thinking about the world, but being in the world, is equally important.

And this new way, of thinking of the world, and being in it must on a profound level realize the connectedness of everything.

This thread of thinking can be traced in the ecologic thinkers that followed from Guattari, to Latour, to today’s Harraway and Neimamis.

Guattari expands on connectedness and talks about respectively:

Mental ecology – A new sense of connectedness to self as one living entity.

Social ecology – A new social ecology in groups of living entities.

Environmental ecology – Understanding the interconnectedness of everything – of oneself, with others, with everything in nature on a planetary scale and complete cosmic intertwinement – We are all made of stardust.

So, to my surprise a deep ontological sense of connectedness was evoked in a vast majority of the participants in Sisters Hope and the notebooks, this in situ data travelling from within the aesthetic experience, bore witness to that.

In aesthetic research it is not so usual to work with ‘big data’. Often it is the individual researcher who takes their own personal experience as the starting point in dialogue with a theoretic framework for example. And when bigger data projects are engaged in, this data is often generated either before or after the aesthetic experience from questions such as; What do you expect? And how was it? So, these questions are not asked while immersed in the aesthetic experience. We do not want to disturb that. However, before and after other cognitive processes might respond rather than from the epistemological and ontological sensuous entanglement while being in it. The se notebooks, this in situ data responsds from within and so, gives very special information on what is happening to us while immersed in the sensuous and poetic.

All the notebooks are donated to our Archive by the participants, with a signed archive conscent, when they leave Sisters Hope. And The Archive is open source. It will now be placed in our upcoming Center of the Sensuous –  that we hope will be a Nordic lighthouse for the power of the sensuous in the transition to more sustainable futures based in Copenhagen – You are all welcome!

So, to round up I will share words from one Sisters Hope participant at Sisters Academy – The Boarding School at Inkonst, Malmö, Sweden:

“I was once asked how I knew I had fallen in love. ”Why, it was when every day became poetry,” I replied.

How would it feel then, to live as if you were always in love? That’s what I experienced with Sisters Academy.

Nothing was an accident at the Academy. A gorgeous, glimmering serendipity was everywhere, but accidents? None. Almost getting lost as one first entered the Academy, stumbling a little blindly through the thick, dark, heavy, fringed masses of curtains that constituted the ”Initiation”. Eggs scattered everywhere, carefully set outside the teacher’s doors, cooked into the meals, lying in forms of crystal, glass and fiber throughout the Academy’s many levels. A steady hum of soft voices, improvised song and tapestry-like conversations warmed up the womb at all hours. We stewed and grew, all of us, like the sweet succulents in the Gardener’s room. Each class watered us hungry little seeds, each teacher sang a song of love in the garden of our souls. Our beds were a series of connected cradles, placed in neat rows in a carefully darkened room. Our birth loomed both heavy and light before us.

Our poetic selves waited for us to find them through broken mirrors. The Academy didn’t try and pass itself off as a utopia, but rather offered to balance the lack of emphasis on the aesthetic dimension that the ”outside world” is so marked by, particularly in the capitalist, consumerist, industrialized Western world. For three weeks it existed to challenge, elate, and push to the limit all those who dared to enter its doors. Birth is no painless experience, and I didn’t go a day without experiencing an astringent, cloying combination of longing, euphoria and the emergence of suppressed memories that occasionally brought me to my knees. Facilitated by our amazing teachers, each sense was at constant and heightened attention. One was an ephemeral veil of lace, another a dancing flame. One walked and danced like a queen, yet another offered to paint you with his gaze from the shadows. I found the poetry that had spoken to me my entire life sang in loud, unafraid, shining verses around and around my head, in circles of light and shadow. It was the song of my rebirth, of finding my twin through my poetic self.

Her name was the Moon.””

Shared words at The Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, May 2025.