RESIDENCY
Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth
The Scandinavian duo Riitta Ikonen & Karoline Hjorth formed Eyes as Big as Plates in 2011 - an ongoing collaboration around photography and sculpture carried out across the world from Greenland, South Korea, Tasmania, Finland, to the United States. The series is produced in collaboration with retired farmers, fishermen, zoologists, plumbers, opera singers, housewives, artists, academics and ninety year old parachutists. Each image in the series presents a solitary figure in a landscape, dressed in elements from surroundings that indicate neither time nor place. Here nature acts as both content and context: characters literally inhabit the landscape wearing sculptures they create in collaboration with the artists.
Working in Senegal Their time in Senegal was dedicated to researching, approaching and working with local communities while discovering the few remaining zones of untouched lands of Senegal.
Throughout this residency, they collaborated with one of the oldest fisherman of Terrou Baye Sogui, an artisan of Marché Kermel, the manager of tree plantation in a small region within Sine Saloum, two grandmothers that worked in their fields their whole life in Sine Saloume, cultivating mills and bissap flowers in Ndoss village, and our wonderful driver, Moussa. Fields of baobabs and the sea shore became their temporary open air studios.
They engaged with each collaborator by presenting them with their artistic project, discussing the significance of arts, human’s modern relationship to nature, sharing views on Dakar’s unceasing urban development. Multiple worlds converged throughout this residency, challenging each others’ ideas on human’s relationship with the environment.
Six new photographs were added to the Eyes as Big as Plates series!
