Åsa Sonjasdotter

Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, writer and organiser, living by the island of Ven in Sweden and the city of Berlin in Germany. Her work explores knowledge, memory, loss and mourning by engaging in processes for the restoration of nurturing livelihoods and abundant imagination. Sonjasdotter’s recent publication Peace with the Earth, Tracing Agricultural Memory – Refiguring Practice (Archive Books, 2019) enquires overlooked farming histories connected to the staple crops of emmer wheat, potatoes, and turnips. Her ongoing work, Cultivating Abundance, follows the re-cultivation of peasant-bred grains rescued from the deep freezers of the Nordic Gene Bank. Commissioned by the Bergen Assembly, Norway in 2019, Cultivating Abundance has been shown at the Biennale of Warsaw, the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Württembergischen Kunstvereins, Stuttgart, and further places. Sonjasdotter is a founding member of the Neighbourhood Academy (2015 onward), a bottom-up learning site in Prinzessinnengarten, Berlin. Since 2018, she is a researcher in Artistic Practice at Valand Academy, the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.