Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (LAE)

Founded in 2016 by Saami fiber artist Márjá Karlsen and Danish climatologist Dr. Erik Nørgaard, the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (LAE) bridges glacial core samples and traditional textile practices to make ecological collapse viscerally tangible. Their methodology, “stitched data,” transforms satellite metrics into material archives: arctic permafrost melt rates correlate to disappearing stitches in Saami gákti patterns, while Andean glacier retreat is encoded into shrinking Quechua weaving motifs. During their 2022 Fjällräven Crisis project, LAE partnered with Sámi reindeer herders to knit radioactive contamination levels (from nearby mining) into woolen mittens, later used as evidence in a landmark Indigenous land rights lawsuit.

LAE’s Ecological Grief Looms initiative deploys portable textile stations to disaster zones, teaching communities to weave real-time climate data into memorial tapestries. Their 2023 collaboration with the IPCC, Codex Cryosphere, embedded 100 years of ice melt projections into Inca quipu knot systems—an ancient Andean recording method—displayed at COP28 as tactile climate accords. The lab’s Mycelium Dye Libraries in Quito cultivate fungal pigments that shift color with air pollution changes, creating living maps of environmental toxicity. Essentially, LAE uses a range of traditional and indigenous art techniques to reveal the planetary-wide degradation caused by global climate change at the ecological level.

LAE’s headquarters is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. They also maintain an Arctic hub in the Sápmi Territory (across Norway, Sweden, and FInland), as well as an Andean hub in Quito, Ecuador.

City

Copenhagen

Country

Denmark

Region

Europe

Year of Creation

2016

Featured Project

SLSA GREEN

This art program at the 2018 SLSAeu Green Conference was co-curated by the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and (OU)VERT. The conference, operated by LAE, merged a range of experts’ work in various fields into a series of interdisciplinary exploration sessions, each interrogating, showcasing, and mapping the concept of “green,” both as a medium and a concept. Experts and contributors included artists, scientists, researchers, and more from the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (dubbed “SLSAeu”). Several lines of inquiry emerged from the event: how do we define and understand greenness as an urgent political, societal, philosophical, and economic question, especially given its conflicting semiotic meanings and its proclivity to be misused by corporations (i.e. the issue of “greenwashing”). Greenness is often connoted as a positive ecological force across many disciplines— especially in engineering. SLSA GREEN involved a broad range of artists to interogate the ways in which the color green is often reduced to a mere metaphor, stripped of its material, epistemological, and historical referents by bad-actors attempting to seem more ecologically benign. The program involved artists and scientists working with soundscapes, installations, live chemistry demonstrations, performance lectures, physical plant/agricultural displays, and much more.

SLSA GREEN

Resources

Drum, Meredith. “Green: 12th Conference of the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu).” University of Copenhagen, 13 Jun. 2018, https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/5e61ac1f-c070-4398-9a0e-c43d6cf4c521/content.

Fournier, Lauren. “Fermenting Feminism as Methodology and Metaphor: Approaching Transnational Feminist Practices through Microbial Transformation.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 12, no. 1, Duke University Press, 1 May 2020, pp. 88–112. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142220.

“Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology.” Counterspace, https://counterspace.zone/2021/01/25/laboratory-for-aesthetics-and-ecology.

“Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology.” Framer Framed, https://framerframed.nl/en/organisaties/laboratory-for-aesthetics-and-ecology.

Partridge, Rebecca. “Nature // The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology: An Interview with Ida Bencke.” BerlinArtLink, 12 Jul. 2016, https://www.berlinartlink.com/2016/07/12/nature-the-laboratory-for-aesthetics-and-ecology-an-interview-with-ida-bencke/.

Vesala, Essi (Remi). Practicing Coexistence: Entanglements Between Ecology and Curating Art. MA thesis, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, 2019, urn:nbn:se:su:diva-170794.

More Information

labae.org

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