Lerin/Hystad

Within Their Breath (2025)  

We seek out the light of the clearing, on the heights overlooking Hasslöv. The silver-gray trunks catch the evening light, casting a reflection over last year’s decaying leaves, which smolder in the dry moss bed between twigs and tufts of grass. Stretched out on a leafy fallow rest a storm-fallen beech. We place our sensors on a cypress braid that captures electrical activity inside the brown-green web. Although plants are sessile creatures, they are constantly exploring their surroundings. They consist of various internal and external networks that intertwine them with their environment. We record electrical data from the plants and convert them into sound through sonification, where the plants themselves determine the tones, melodies, and rhythms of the music. With the pencil, Hystad carefully tries to trace the smallest details of the beech trunk in a gentle encounter where drawing becomes a tool for knowledge, a way of getting to know each other.  

We are in Osbeck’s beech forest outside Laholm through the residency The Listener. Here, the mosses embrace the tall tree trunks, deep green ornaments originating in the Ordovician that are returning to the forest as the air quality improves. But the old beech trunk vibrates with a slow pulse. From the flaking bark, a freshly greased snail glides safely over the exposed wood. The stump pad slowly strokes its black tar, finds cavities, carefully reads in. Cream-colored velvet needles decorate the log with fan-shaped hats. The cypress braid finds peace in the wet together with the sphagnum moss. Here it can carry out its photosynthesis. Here it can play over several octaves in symbiosis with the blue-green algae. To live is to breathe and in its breath embrace all the matter in the world. 

– Lerin/Hystad 

The artist duo Lerin/Hystad consists of Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad. Since 2010, they have worked together in the borderland between visual art and experimental music. The duo’s practice rests on the principle of ecological interconnectedness and presupposes the existence of worlds beyond the human one. 

https://www.lerinhystad.com/

Residency The Listener (Laholm Municipality, 2025) asked what it means to listen to nature’s own voices. What sounds, choruses, tones, wills and stories emerge then? What stories do the forests and seas themselves draw up, and what do they say about us?