SPARK
The Art-Science Collaborative Program SPARK is launched in collaboration with the Globe Institute at the University of Copenhagen. The initiative aims to foster meaningful exchanges between artistic and scientific practices, encouraging joint exploration of the big questions that shape our understanding of life, health, and the environment.
The program provides a production budget and institutional support for artistic outputs emerging from art–science duos. Each project team consists of at least one artist and one Globe Institute scientist.
The program provides support for artists to partner with a Globe scientist for a year to realise a joint artistic project. The culmination of this process will be an artistic output led by the artist, inspired by, or possibly co-conceptualised with, their scientific partner. The collective outputs will benefit from the curatorial expertise at Art Hub Copenhagen, forming a public presentation of the work at the conclusion of the program period.
Click on the titles to see the project descriptions:
Artists
SONJA STRANGE & BARBARA AMALIE SKOVMAND
Researcher
ADRIEN HOUGE
PLANETARY DUST MACHINE – FROM DUST YOU CAME, FROM DUST YOU SHALL REMAIN
Earth’s story begins with a single dust grain, a leftover from a newborn star. Colliding and sticking, these grains grew into pebbles that spiralled inward toward their star, carrying water ice and organic molecules that eventually accumulated into planets like Earth. We wish to build an installation with a performing dust machine that visualises Dr. Houge’s research in a concrete and poetic manner. It will be a sensuous machine that blends sound and visuals to bring this cosmic story to life.
Artists
EMMA HARRIS & LI LINDBLOM
Researcher
GIULIA ZAMPIROLO
TIDAL FRAGMENTS – TRANSFORMATIONS OF MARINE LIFE ACROSS DEEP TIME
Tidal Fragments is an art-science collaboration that transforms microscopic fragments of ancient marine life and their invisible ecological histories into perceptible form. Working with ancient environmental DNA of seagrass, phytoplankton and bacteria preserved in marine sediments from the Kattegat, it explores deep-time transformations of marine ecosystems and how species, humans and coastal environments have evolved together over millennia. Through shared laboratory and studio experimentation, these traces are translated into an immersive sensory installation using analogue film and sand-casted sculptural forms, connecting ancient marine ecologies with the rapid changes unfolding in today’s oceans.
Artist
ZOE LOHMANN
Researcher
ALESSANDRO MEREGHETTI
KEYSTONE
Keystone is a collaborative project between celebrating trailblazers in nature and culture alike. Inspired by Alessandro’s work studying the effect of megafauna on vegetation and its legacy after extinction, Keystone is an artistic response by drag and theatre artist Zoe Lohmann that draws a parallel to the legacy of queer innovation in major cultural revolutions. Who are the building blocks that keep an ecosystem or society alive and thriving? Is the ensuing collapse/extinction inevitable? What legacy is left behind, and how do we rebuild? At a time when we are witnessing the collapse of ecosystems all around us, as well as cultural and political shifts erasing queer visibility & legacy, these questions feel not only relevant but urgent.
Artist
MORGAN HICKINBOTHAM
Researcher
EMMA VITALE
APPROACHING THE PAST THROUGH PRACTICE
Approaching the Past through Practice is a collaborative research project between archaeologist Emma Vitale and sound artist Morgan Hickinbotham that combines experimental archaeology and process-based field recording to explore how knowledge of the past emerges through embodied engagement rather than representation. Vitale’s research on Greenlandic dog sled technologies approaches archaeology through reconstruction, maintenance, repair, and apprenticeship, understanding technologies as evolving systems shaped by humans, animals, climate, and materials. Hickinbotham’s field recording practice similarly treats sound as a process of environmental attunement and distributed authorship rather than documentation, producing compositions that trace engagement with place. Together, the project proposes a shared methodology centred on process, enskilment, and collaboration with nonhuman agents, exploring how listening and field recording can function as a parallel form of experimental archaeology that approaches the past through shared, situated, and environmentally responsive practice.
Artist
KIRSTINE AUTZEN
Researcher
ANA PROHASKA
ALL THE SOFT ALWAYS GOES AWAY