{"id":45912,"date":"2026-09-08T10:50:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/?p=45912"},"modified":"2026-09-08T10:51:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T08:51:08","slug":"land-crafting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/land-crafting\/","title":{"rendered":"Land Crafting"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"project":[357,354],"project_type":[807,725,732,735,738,737,742],"class_list":["post-45912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-solitude-blog","project-studio-visits","project_type-studio-visit","project_type-formats","project_type-interview","project_type-spheres-of-practice","project_type-scientific","project_type-societal-communal","project_type-spatial"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Patrick Urbani: Marie, thank you for taking the time to speak with me. To begin, could you introduce yourself and your practice?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMarie Skeie:<\/span> Hi Patrick. My name is Marie Skeie. I'm based in Hardanger, Norway, and work primarily as a textile artist. I also have a Master's degree in Art in Public Space, so I've always been interested in the social aspects of art\u2014art beyond the studio and exhibition space. I think of it as art in relation.\r\n\r\nPU: Your practice spans textile art, artistic research, public art, and long-term collaborations. How would you describe it today?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> I'm interested in what the materials, techniques, and knowledge embedded in them can reveal, and what kinds of relationships they can open \u2013 both with our surroundings and communities, and with our human and non-human neighbors and cohabitants of this earth.\r\n\r\nPU: Looking back, what connects your earliest work to what you're doing today?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> I often think of my practice as a spiral. The same threads keep returning, but they expand over time. One of my first bachelor-level projects began with a simple question. Coming from a Japanese upbringing, where I learned calligraphy, I was used to spending a long time practicing a single stroke. I thought that if I wanted to become a textile artist, I first needed to know how to make a thread.\r\n\r\nI started learning rope-making at the maritime center in Hardanger, where one of Norway's few remaining rope makers was working. Through that craft I also became involved in a collaboration between Norwegian and Palestinian artists, making rope sculptures together.\r\n\r\nFrom there, my practice expanded beyond the artwork itself. Rope-making also revealed geographical connections between Hardanger and northern Norway, where locally built boats were used for seasonal fishing. Suddenly these ropes connected landscapes, histories, and people.\r\n\r\nLooking back, I realize my work has always been about connections \u2013 not only between people, but also between places, materials, and stories. Storytelling has remained a constant thread."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":false,"img":[45896],"img_gallery_format":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"PU: Textiles have remained central to your work, even as it has expanded into installations, performances, and collaborative projects. What keeps bringing you back to textiles?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> Textile is the first material we encounter when we're born, and often the last material that surrounds us when we die. It accompanies us throughout life.\r\n\r\nIt also carries extraordinary cultural histories. The Industrial Revolution was deeply connected to textiles, as were colonial histories through fibers and pigments. There are so many ways into the material.\r\n\r\nEven the word textile is connected to text. Some historians argue that weaving predates writing, and that the oldest surviving forms of text are woven. The computers we use today are built on woven logic through binary systems.\r\n\r\nThen there\u2019s the personal dimension. My grandmother was a seamstress, my other grandmother was a weaver, and my mother practiced Japanese wax batik, which she later taught me. Textiles have simply always been part of my life.\r\n\r\nPU: Your recent work focuses on plant dyes and what you call land crafting. How did this direction emerge, and what does the term mean to you?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> The interest has been there for a long time. My mother experimented with plant dyeing when I was young, and later, during my studies, I became increasingly interested in materials themselves. There has also been a broader material turn in contemporary art, particularly in Norway, where plant dyeing has received renewed attention.\r\n\r\nFor me, though, it's never only about color. I'm interested in the stories behind plants and their connection to place, memory, and history.\r\n\r\nOne of my first works consisted of glasses containing fibers, water, and plant dyes, weighted with stones collected along the Norwegian-Russian border. Inside were plants gathered both from that border landscape and from a depopulated Palestinian village near Gaza. The work explored borders, while the dyes slowly bonded with the fibers through fermentation and organic transformation.\r\n\r\nAround the same time, I became interested in Hypericum, or St. John's Wort, which grows in many places \u2013 including around Solitude. If you rub the flowers between your fingers, they release a deep red color because of the medicinal compounds inside. When used as a dye, however, it produces yellow, orange and green.\r\n\r\nI became fascinated by the plant's multiple meanings. It is widely used as an antidepressant in Germany, but historically it has also been regarded as a protective plant. I used it to dye textile slings holding hand-blown glass vessels from Hebron in a work about vulnerability and protection."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":false,"img":[45898],"img_gallery_format":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"PU: It seems that plants also change the way you experience landscapes.<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> Absolutely. Plant dyeing completely changed how I look at my surroundings. Walking around Solitude, I don't just see vegetation anymore \u2013 I notice plants I can dye with. It changes how you pay attention to a place.\r\n\r\nI've also seen this happen in workshops. Learning about dye plants creates a different ecological awareness. People begin to notice their neighborhoods differently.\r\n\r\nThe process also opens conversations. I remember dyeing with children in Gaza when we met an elderly Bedouin woman in an olive grove. She told us how her mother and grandmother had dyed textiles. Suddenly the practice became a way of sharing memories connected to that place.\r\n\r\nThat's why I'm often more interested in the process than the finished object.\r\n\r\nI use the term land crafting because it connects making to agriculture and to our long histories of working with the land. I'm less interested in romantic ideas of untouched wilderness than in how we live with landscapes. Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble has been very important for me in that regard.\r\n\r\nPU: Haraway writes that not everything is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something.<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> Exactly. That way of thinking helps us recognize complexity.\r\n\r\nThrough this work I've also become increasingly interested in local knowledge. In the forests around my home, I know where mushrooms grow because I've learned to read moisture, sunlight, and terrain. You begin to register landscapes with your body.\r\n\r\nThat's another reason I use the term land crafting. Craft is embodied knowledge. It's something learned through practice rather than only through thought. I think that connects closely to Haraway's idea of situated knowledge.\r\n\r\nPU: Long-term collaboration is another defining aspect of your practice. What draws you to working over extended periods of time?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> I like building things slowly. Relationships take time.\r\n\r\nThe Stitch Project is probably my longest collaboration. It was initiated by the artists Hilde Hauan (NO), Kiyoshi Yamamoto (BR\/JP), Britta Marakatt-Labba (SE\/S\u00e1pmi), Omaya Salman (PS), Hildur Bjarnadottir (ISL), Margrethe Kolstad Brekke (NO) and myself. When we started, we imagined it would last four years, which already felt ambitious. Today we've decided it will simply continue.\r\n\r\nThat feels important because cultural systems often demand constant novelty. Funding increasingly favors new projects, but long-term collaborations accumulate stories and relationships that couldn't develop otherwise.\r\n\r\nThey can also rest and later be reactivated, which is something I do frequently in my practice.\r\n\r\nThe Stitch Project began in 2012 after two events that deeply affected us: the Fukushima disaster in Japan and the attacks on Ut\u00f8ya in Norway. We began asking whether textiles could become spaces for gathering, conversation, and collective care.\r\n\r\nAt the same time, my experiences in Palestine reinforced the idea that textiles can cross borders. Shared patterns, colors, and techniques create connections, even when people don't share a language.\r\n\r\nSince then, the project has taken many forms. At a South S\u00e1mi festival we collaborated with experienced wool spinners whose weaving tradition has remained unbroken across generations. Together we began spinning an imaginary thread stretching all the way to Hebron, calculating how many generations it would take to produce such a thread by hand.\r\n\r\nWhat makes the project meaningful is not only the artwork, but also the exchange of knowledge between artists, craftspeople, and generations. Fourteen years later, it is still growing."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":true,"img":[45902,45900],"img_gallery_format":"is-3by2"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"PU: I'd like to ask about Sage Passage, a project that has been very present at Solitude and during the Metabolic Futures II festival. It brings together many strands of your practice \u2013 human relationships with plants and landscapes, while also addressing the suppression of local communities and situated knowledge. Could you tell us more about it?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> It was a great opportunity to revisit the project. I first exhibited the work in 2023, and, as with many of my projects, it rested for a while before being reactivated. I like returning to works because they can take on new forms in different contexts.\r\n\r\nFor the festival, I wanted to focus more on the sensory aspect, so I invited people on a walk where I shared different stories connected to bundles of sage.\r\n\r\nThese particular bundles have their own history. I bought them in East Jerusalem in September 2023. I was supposed to travel to Gaza, but we were refused entry at the border, so I never brought them there."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_img","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Bild(er)","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"img_gallery":false,"img":[45904],"img_gallery_format":false},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"The sage itself carries many layers. It doesn't grow easily in Gaza but in the surrounding mountains. The women selling it in East Jerusalem often come from the West Bank and take considerable risks crossing into the city. At the same time, Palestinians are prohibited from gathering wild plants such as sage, wild thyme, and wild thistle. So even these everyday plants become political.\r\n\r\nLike many plants, sage also carries multiple cultural and historical meanings. For the performance, participants carried the sage in glass vessels wrapped in silk that I had dyed with plants. Afterwards we shared tea and burned the sage together. It became a collective sensory experience \u2013 a shared gesture.\r\n\r\nAgain, it's a kind of weaving. Different stories, materials, and experiences come together.\r\n\r\nPU: A pattern really emerges across your practice. From The Stitch Project to Colors of Gaza and your work with plant dyes, relationships seem just as important as the finished artwork. Is your primary medium textile \u2013 or relationships?<\/span>\r\n\r\nMS:<\/span> It's probably both, but relationships may be a little more important.\r\n\r\nI'm very interested in combining pedagogy and art, and pedagogy is fundamentally about relationships. There is no pedagogy without them.\r\n\r\nThe same is true for textile practices. If someone teaches you how to weave or stitch, that's pedagogy at its core. Knowledge is passed on through making together.\r\n\r\nThat's what continues to interest me. Textile is never only the material itself. It's also the relationships, conversations and exchanges that the material makes possible.\r\n\r\nPU: Thank you very much, Marie.<\/span>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_audio","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Audio-Aufnahme","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"audio":{"audio_mp3":null,"audio_wav":null},"audio_embed":"https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/akademieschlosssolitude\/sage-passages-by-marie-skeie?si=50a6baa6e5f049a09596227efcfe6d9e&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","_acfe_flexible_layout_title":null,"acfe_flexible_layout_title":"Text","bgcolor":"has-bg-grey","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"

Marie Skeie<\/span><\/strong> is an artist, researcher, and curator based in Hardanger\/Norway. Her work moves between artistic and craft-based practices, research, and activism, with a focus on collective processes, public space, and environmental knowledge. She studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Bergen\/Norway, the National Academy of Art and Design in Oslo\/Norway, and the University of Bergen. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of South-Eastern Norway. In her doctoral project Colors of Gaza, she brings her plant dyeing practice into a kindergarten setting in Gaza.<\/p>\r\n

Patrick Urbani<\/span><\/strong> is an artist and curator whose practice explores the potential of art to foster new ways of seeing, relating, and being in the world. Working across exhibitions, moving image, and collaborative formats, he is particularly interested in the intersections of contemporary art, ecology, and social engagement. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, where he specialized in experimental cinema.<\/p>"}],"intro_preview_headline":"Land Crafting","intro_preview_txt":"Marie Skeie's artistic practice brings together textiles, plant dyes, artistic research, and long-term collaboration to explore the relationships between people, materials, and landscapes. In this conversation with Patrick Urbani, she reflects on the evolution of her work, the stories embedded in craft, and the role of making as a way of sharing knowledge, care, and ecological awareness.<\/span>","intro_preview_img":45907,"post_id_old":"","post_author":null,"post_subtitle":"Patrick Urbani in conversation with Marie Skeie \u2013 studio visit","post_preview_img_hide_on_single":false,"post_txt_old":"","post_pdf":"","post_copyright":"ccl_default","translated_post":false,"translations":null,"post_copyright_individual":"","post_related_posts":[40748,13673],"related_posts_post":[43382]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45912"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46604,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45912\/revisions\/46604"}],"acf:post":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/person\/43382"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13673"},{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=45912"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=45912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}