Jakob Oredsson is an artist, architect and scenographer, currently Assistant Professor at Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA). After receiving a BA in scenography from NTA, Jakob studied architecture at The Cooper Union and The Pratt Institute in New York and received an MA in Architecture from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Oredsson has realized works in public, gallery and theatre contexts. Works which endeavor to engage existing environment in its very form, seeking to queer binaries such as art-context, form-content, active-passive and culture-nature, accentuating ambiguity and embracing flat ontology.
www.jakoboredsson.com
Artistic Research project realized 2020-2024 through The Fellowship Programme under the direction of the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme (PhD equivalent):
Scenography as Symbiosis
Abstract
Scenography as Symbiosis is an artistic research project developed by Jakob Oredsson, as research fellow at the scenography department at Norwegian Theatre Academy, Østfold University College, as part of The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.
In its broadest sense, Scenography as Symbiosis has explored ways of imagining an ontology of scenography through and within an artistic practice. With regard to scenography, or skenographia, an understanding of skene as environment, while graphia as description is suggested, implying an understanding of scenography as environment described, or describing environment. One of the propositions of the research is that it appears that scenography exists, perhaps always existed, as a kind of friction within binaries such as scene-stage, onstage-offstage, auditorium-stage, and architecture-theatre.
Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is the main philosophical theory influencing the artistic research project. OOO proposes an uncommon understanding of what an object is. The word object often carries meanings of something distinct, material, solid, durable, inhuman, and inanimate, “dead” rather than “alive”. An OOO object may be anything which is more than what it is made of, and more than what it does, meaning that objects are not reducible to the components of which they are configured, or the context and circumstances they exist in relation to (Harman 2018, 12, 51).
In the research project, scenography has been explored with reference to Graham Harman’s writings on symbiosis with an OOO perspective. Harman describes Lynn Margulis’ theories on biological symbiosis, through which a distinction is made between moments of gradual change and moments of symbiosis between distinct beings, which leads to a new being. With the OOO view, symbiosis is biographical as well as biological, meaning it is not only biological objects which can enter into symbiosis, but any other objects as well (Harman 2018, 111-112).
Four works which constitute the core artistic research results, have been realized in four different contexts during the three years of the research project. These contexts can be placed within the categories of public, gallery, and theatre, even though existing to various degrees within these. The overall chronological trajectory of the research project moves from the public environment into the gallery and finally into the theatre. It is in relation to unique contexts with particular multitudinous layers, scenes, surfaces, stories, and stages, etc. which the works of scenography have been created.
Through these works, Scenography as Symbiosis has explored ways of imagining an ontology of scenography through and within an artistic practice, the works in themselves in different ways manifesting the how of the being of scenography. Embracing an OOO understanding of symbiosis, it is suggested that all the realized works of scenography existed as new symbiotic objects, which came into being through biographical symbiosis between objects within existing environments.
www.scenography-as-symbiosis.com
Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology - A New Theory of Everything. Pelican books
Portrait photo: Marco Ghilardi