Jærtegn(2025)

Various locations, Sør-Varanger

In Jærtegn, nematodes take on the role as unknowable guides whose haunting of the Sør-Varanger landscape becomes a conversation with soil as a medium; in continuous interaction with the world around it, rendering connections between place, science, politics, myth and scale legible.

A travelling installation of entangled textile nematodes, blown up to a human scale, haunts nine places in Sør-Varanger over nine nights; mythical places, agricultural ditches, sites of mining waste, mires, gardens, petrol stations and more. Simultaneously, the local library’s space and technology are appropriated: soil spreads across the floor, while a nightvision video haunts the information screens, and the pages of a zine the printer. Both video and printer responds to the nightly movement of the textile nematodes. The video work uses a trail camera’s night vision, framing scientific observation as staged, shaped and obscured by our subjective, human perspective. The grimoire-zine operates as a speculative counterpoint, tracing a personal and devotional encounter with soil and nematodes.

Jærtegn is inspired by Svanhovd biological station’s research on nematodes in the Arctic soil, and how these small microscopic worms continually evade standardized classification and sampling methods. Where the natural sciences tend to see nematodes as indicators of soil health, and are drawn to the vast number of unregistered species, Jærtegn follows these roundworms as unruly, unknowable guides into different relations between humans and soil.