Lotta Petronella and Taru Elfving have been invited by curator and author Jonatan Habib Engqvist. They have over the course of several years been working on a long-terminterdisciplinary investigation connecting archipelagos in the Baltic with archipelagos in the Caribbean through Transhemsiférica (Fernando Lloveras, Taru Elfving, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Maria Kamilla Larsen and Michy Marxuach). During her stay, Lotta Petronella will visit the Swedish National Archives as part of her ongoing research around the island of Själö, Seili, in the Turku archipelago and private reading performances that can be booked in advance with her Tarot Herbarium called Reading with the plants and the island.
Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and curator based on an island in Finland. She is co- founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and has worked with and on islands for two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili. Her latest work Materia Medica of Islands was a new commission for Helsinki Biennial in 2023. In addition to her filmmaking and art practice, Petronella is a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. She also writes poems, makes soundscapes and runs a podcast called Little screams.
Taru Elfving is curator and writer nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As director and co-founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago she currently leads the research residency collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute (Turku University) on the island of Seili. She is also a researcher in the newly launched Centre for Sustainable Ocean Studies at Åbo AkademiUniversity. She has published internationally and co-edited publications such as Contemporary Artist Residencies(Valiz 2019). She visited NKF's guest studio in 2022 as part of the Redefining Residency project and collaborated with the CRIS.