Facing the spills
Library Nights #4
Facing the Spills
Thursday 8 January, 19.00
Rijksakademie Reading Room
Entrance free, RSVP here
Taking a preview of their most recent work as a starting point, Katía Truijen will be in conversation with Polina Medvedeva (RA 20/22) and Andreas Kühne on their method of assembling film live, Kühne’s PhD research suggesting “feedback improvisations” as reciprocal modes of relational listening and sounding, as well as Truijen's research into ways of listening to erased landscapes.
Shrubs crackling in midsummer, mushrooms on their decades-long cycle decomposing WWII ruins amid renewed Arctic preparedness, rivers are dammed borders, fjords – solidified waste facilities, Indigenous hunting pits outscaled by settler mining pits.
Following their research in Northern Norway on Indigenous Sápmi land since 2022, the work invites us to listen with a shapeshifter's tactile encounters with the genealogy of a changing Arctic border landscape. Over the past centuries it has transformed into a slurry of pasts spilling into pasts, where the tissue decomposes and is disseminated by multispecies auto re-wilding, while echoing in today’s socio-economic and environmental decay. Moving beyond language, the non-narrative film engages sound as a multisensory encounter with this patchwork and juxtaposes movement, touch and technology as ways of sense- and placemaking. How can we be sensitive to the interconnectedness of histories, memories and imaginaries within an alienated landscape? Can politicising listening to these trajectories be a way of (ac)knowledging our position as artists whose practice uses the very minerals linked to contested mineral prospects in Sápmi?
Polina Medvedeva
Polina Medvedeva (NL/NO, 1989, she/her) works within the intersection of film, installation and performance, exploring formats that allow for multiplicity of narratives, site specificity, and audio responsive imagery. Thinking through loopholes and informal economic structures, she is interested in foregrounding stories of circumventing political prohibitions, societal stereotypes, and effects of economic crises and conflicts. Her focus on the tactics of civil disobedience and mechanisms of vernacular resilience – improvised, passed through generations as oral histories, smuggled in through migration – speaks of the (im)possibilities of existing within while being against systems of oppression. Medvedeva has been a resident at de Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2020/2022) and her work was exhibited and performed at among others Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Sonic Acts Festival, Nederlands Film Festival, BAK (NL), Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall, Lofoten International Art Festival, Tromsø Kunstforening, Ultima Festival (NO), WIELS (BE), Cité Internationale des Arts (FR), HYBRID Biennale (DE), Baltic Circle (FI) and Lighthouse (UK). Medvedeva has been a guest tutor at Sandberg Instituut, KMD Bergen, ArtEZ, Gerrit Rietveld Academie and a tutor and lecturer at the Utrecht University of the Arts. She is a member of the selection committee for the Creative Industries Fund NL and a board member of The One Minutes Foundation.
Andreas Kühne
Andreas Kühne (NL/NO, 1988, he/him) is a sound artist, composer, and drummer making electroacoustic music, collaborative audiovisual performances and interactive installations questioning listening positionalities through relational improvisation practices. His artistic research looks into sound as multisensory modes of sense- and placemaking to face industrialisation and settler entanglements to human and more-than-human landscapes in Sápmi.
Andreas is a PhD fellow in electronic music and music technology at the Academy of Music, The Arctic University of Norway (UiT) and Grieg Academy, University of Bergen (UiB). His work has been exhibited and performed at among others Tromsø Kunstforening, Landmark Bergen Kunsthall, Lofoten International Art Festival, Arctic University Museum of Norway (NO), Sonic Acts Festival, Rewire Festival (NL), HYBRID Biennale (DE), Baltic Circle Festival (FI), and Lighthouse (UK).
Katía Truijen
Katía Truijen (NL, 1990, she/her) is a media researcher, curator, educator and musician. Her work is concerned with bringing people together around practices of listening, archiving, and rehearsing alternative urban, technological and ecological futures. She develops public formats – from public programmes, performances and parties to publications – always situated and in collaboration with others. Katía is part of Loom, practice for cultural transformation. She curates the context programme for Rewire festival (NL) and Ultima festival (NO), and teaches at the Studio for Immediate Spaces at the Sandberg Instituut (NL). She is co-editor of Further Listening (2026, forthcoming), Epistemic Imaginaries – Learning as Festivity (2025), For the Record: On the Politics of Music Video Culture (2021), and Architecture of Appropriation: On Squatting as Spatial Practice (2019). Between 2014 and 2021, Katía developed research projects and public programmes at the Nieuwe Instituut (NL).
Public Programme
Our calendar of events, project presentations, talks & readings.
