About SEA

Join us under the sea – and into the working process of artist and landscape architect Elin T. Sørensen, where the marine world is our teacher and source of knowledge and inspiration. The exhibition is a sensory experience suitable for people of all ages – with a separate activity zone for the little ones.

Norwegian BioArt Arena (NOBA) is the Science Park's new initiative on art and artists working with living materials and biology in the encounter with the world and toolbox of science. HAV is NOBA's very first exhibition, and is an art experience that arises in the encounter with the coastal landscape and the sea, the inhabitants of the sea - the marine plants and animals, those who research the sea - the marine biologists and many more.

In the exhibition's aquarium, Elin T. Sørensen's diversity-promoting architecture is tested by different species. Here, a house for marine life made of recycled technical porcelain is used as a posting post by a shrimp. Photo: Joe Joaquin Urrutia/ Vitenparken

HAV – an exhibition about marine landscape architecture

Marine ecosystems are under pressure all over the globe. What is at stake is the diversity of species and their ecosystem functions – which are also vital for us on land. But where cities meet the sea, we humans have distanced ourselves from our connection to the sea. The sea is a bio-ecological zone of great importance to all life on earth. We can also learn this by studying fossil material – because the closer to the shore, the more fossil life there is to be traced. So far, the tendency here in Norway is that urban development is based on human interests. But how can we develop into the sea without destroying life in the water – because then we are also destroying ourselves.

Starfish and seaweed germs on a material sample of technical porcelain, from Sørensen's experiments at NIVA research station Solbergstrand, October 2019. Photo: Annike Flo.

Exhibition and doctoral thesis

In order to help create better living conditions in urban sea areas, we must immerse ourselves in the seascape and try to understand life underwater as best we can. Artist and landscape architect Elin T. Sørensen has done this in her doctoral thesis. She literally goes below the surface and discovers a world that is quite different from that on land. A world that houses enormous forces with marine organisms that live from the shoreline down to the greatest depths. To find ways to co-create with care for mussels and other sea creatures, she explores the sea through one-on-one encounters with marine life, inspired by what Rachel Carson calls the ethics of wonder .

Bryozoan colony living on bladderwrack. Electron microscope photo: Lene Cecilie Hermansen, Imaging Centre, NMBU.

Diversity-promoting marine landscape architecture

To get closer to the sea, Sørensen has connected with the marine field. Together, marine biologist Eli Rinde at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research and Elin have come up with a diversity-promoting marine landscape architecture . The problem when we create our functional and rational fjord-side residential areas is that the natural coast is straightened and flattened. Then the qualities and important ecological functions of the natural shore zone are also erased. In order to physically provide space for life underwater, a 'diversity-promoting marine landscape architecture' helps to bring these qualities back.

OCEAN shows inspiration, process and examples of proposed solutions that have arisen from artistic visions in the face of marine biology, the tidal landscape and, not least, the sea creatures themselves.

Norwegian BioArt Arena

Norwegian BioArt Arena (NOBA) is the Science Park's new initiative for art and artists working with living materials and biology in the face of the world and toolbox of science. NOBA is unique in the Norwegian context and the first physical arena for bio-related art in Norway. Read about NOBA .

BioArt

BioArt is interdisciplinary in nature, employing scientific processes, methods, approaches and tools, often in close collaboration with partners from other fields and other species and organisms. Through these processes and connections, the ecological, geographical, political, biological and cultural are discussed.