Following their ongoing research in Northern Norway on Indigenous Sápmi land that they have done since 2022, the audiovisual performance Facing the Spills by Polina Medvedeva and Andreas Kühne – presented at Rewire on Friday 10 April – invites the audience to listen with a changing Arctic border landscape. Over the past centuries, the landscape has transformed into a slurry of pasts spilling into pasts, where the tissue decomposes and is disseminated by multispecies auto re-wilding, while echoing the socioeconomic and environmental decay of today. 

The day after their performance, they will engage in a conversation with Katía Truijen about their research and artistic methods of assembling film live and “feedback improvisations,” and how to be sensitive to the interconnectedness of histories, memories, and imaginaries within an alienated landscape. Meanwhile, they ask if politicising listening can be a way of acknowledging their position as artists whose practice uses the very minerals linked to contested mineral prospects in Sápmi. 

Polina Medvedeva works within the intersection of film, installation, and performance, exploring formats that allow for multiplicity of narratives, site specificity, and audio responsive imagery. She is interested in foregrounding stories of circumventing political prohibitions, societal stereotypes, and effects of economic crises and conflicts. Medvedeva was a resident at Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (2020–2022) and her work was exhibited and performed internationally. 

Andreas Kühne is a sound artist, composer, and drummer making electroacoustic music, collaborative audiovisual performances, and interactive installations that question 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. Kühne is a PhD fellow at Academy of Music, The Arctic University of Norway and Grieg Academy, University of Bergen.