Signe Johannessen

The Sea Colony (2026)

Do you long to return to the sea? Have you ever searched for webbing between your toes? Or tried to hold your breath for as long as possible beneath the surface of the water? Have you considered that the tears welling up in your eyes carry the same saltiness as the ocean itself? Are you ready to return to another, wetter state of being?

For AIO Co-Lab (2025), I allowed these questions to become an opening – a calling. Through an open call, I invited a group of young people to join the Sea Colony: an artistically demanding experiment and a playful expedition in and around Laholm Bay.

The Sea Colony attracted many applicants. They wrote letters about their longings. About sailcloth, invisible fins, and secret places. They wanted to do the work, become part of the process, and become the artwork itself. We gathered in a time of rising sea levels and shifting planetary conditions, united by a shared desire for a possible, temporary aquatic coexistence.

Together, we approached the sea. We constructed alternative personas and new forms of functionality. We evolved into figures who first longed and then set out across the water. Wetsuits and other bodily adaptations and extensions were designed, worn, and transformed. New organs began to emerge. We conjured new calls, movements, and logic. Another reality took shape—one in which the boundary between body and landscape gradually dissolved.

We moved through the sand dunes as a procession, a flock, a colony in the making—somewhere between play and seriousness, between ritual and exhaustion. The film that emerged from the process follows these bodies: walking along the shoreline as if after a long displacement, resting in the dunes like penguins or cormorants, crawling towards the sea like reptiles. Wetsuits are turned inside out, dragged across the sand, and left behind. Something dissolves; something else begins.

The residency created space for an expansive, open-ended experiment – a process that did not necessarily seek resolution but was allowed to unfold over time. In our encounter with Laholm Bay, the sea became, for us in the Sea Colony, both a physical place and an imagined state of being. During the Sea Colony, a temporary waterborne community took shape: a gesture in motion, where another kind of evolution could be explored—even if only for a brief moment on Earth.

– Signe Johannessen

Signe Johannessen works with sculpture, video, drawing, and performance. Her work often evolves through participatory processes and in collaboration with other fields of knowledge. Her pieces speculate on hybrid bodies, historical paraphrases, and post-humanist possibilities. Operating in the misty borderlands of dusk and dawn, Johannessen explores the possibilities of belonging and becoming, while simultaneously revealing structures of power and resistance.

https://signejohannessen.se/

AIO CoLab (Laholm Municipality, 2025) introduced a new residency platform where artists are invited to co-create through collective artistic processes. What happens when others are invited to participate as active co-creators in the work? How is the artistic work affected when ideas are developed and given form together?