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.