Talk

Art & Craft letures: Kristiina Koskentola: Enfleshed Project–On Practicing With

Enfleshed is ongoing polyvocal long-term research by Kristiina Koskentola and an interdisciplinary, collaborative and multifaceted project that brings together practitioners, thinkers, and artists from across Eurasia to collectively explore multispecies ecologies. The project challenges anthropocentric worldviews by exploring embodied approaches to collaboration and knowledge production- processes that are always interwoven with a multitude of entities and actors. Ecological disaster and the power structures of knowledge production and science intertwine with shamanisms, rituals, magic, speculation, politics, and poetics.

In this lecture, Koskentola reflects on some key notions of her practice and the Enfleshed project. The project negotiates various temporalities and spaces, animistic worldviews and challenges dualisms and conventional understandings of subjectivity and personhood. Across disciplines, temporalities, and multiple sites of knowledge production it engages in long-term collaborations, exchanges and co-creation processes that are reflecting on complex interconnections among human and more-than-human ecologies. Enfleshed is an entanglement that forms catalysts and opens contemplations on the potentials of embodied thinking, listening and interrelationality; on more than human worlds, nonhuman agencies and subjectivities, and their political potential. 

Furthermore, she will give insight on how the Enfleshed project came to being and the continuation of the various collaborations of the Enfleshed ecology. 

Kristiina Koskentola

Kristiina Koskentola is a Finnish transdisciplinary artist with Karelian heritage, PhD. Currently she divides her time between Amsterdam, Helsinki, and Northern China where she has overwintered for over a decade living and working with various communities. This has profound impact on her work, thinking and being in and of the world.

Koskentola’s interdisciplinary practice engages with ecological philosophy, shamanic knowledge systems, and posthuman discourse. Her work often combines field research, and collaborative and polyvocal methodologies. Koskentola works across various mediums including moving image, sound art, publications, (cooking) performances and multisensory installation formats. Intersecting spiritual and material ecologies they foreground relationality between human and more-than-human worlds. For her embodied and multispecies collaborations across diverse worldviews and epistemologies are important form of reflection. Taking the role of a mediator, Koskentola is seeking new ways of participation, weaving together and speculating dialogic, decentred, and more-than-human perspectives among the complexities of entanglements, fragilities, and human failure unfolding between immediate, planetary, and cosmic processes.

The publication Enfleshed – Ecologies of Entities and Beings was published by Onomatopee The Netherlands in 2023, second edition (third print) in 2025. 

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Art and Craft lectures, hosted by the Art and Craft Department at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, is an annual lecture series devoted to art education, research, theory, and politics. The program, curated by Sara R. Yazdani and Susanne M. Winterling, nurtures an interdisciplinary exchange of practice and theory.

Read more about the lecture series.