Pia Rönicke och Johan Tirén

I am looking for what does not exist (2025/2026)

Our work, which began with Pia Rönicke’s participation in Art Inside Out’s residency Between the Rains takes its starting point in the river Lagan, where the freshwater pearl mussel is on the verge of disappearing and where salmon and trout can no longer migrate upstream due to the hydroelectric power plants that currently regulate the flow.

In the video, we move along the river from the mouth at Kattegat to the source area south of Jönköping. By following the movement of the water through the landscape, we approach the layers of time that characterize the place. Here we see nature’s slow processes but also the extensive human interventions that have shaped the watercourse. The dams and power plants we pass appear both as concrete obstacles and as expressions of our society, which is fundamentally reshaping our ecological systems.

With Lagan as both a geographical and symbolic vein, we examine vulnerable ecological cycles in change, where regulation, industrial needs and loss of biodiversity interact. In the work we meet Per Ingvarsson, a water engineer and active in the restoration of aquatic environments. Through his experiences, a threatened habitat emerges, but also a practice of care and resistance, where knowledge and action become ways to reconnect relationships between humans and ecosystems.

The remaining freshwater pearl mussels in Lagan are all over a hundred years old, which testifies to a broken continuity in the life cycle of the species. Their slow existence also contains a temporal dimension that extends beyond human perspectives. As they disappear, knowledge about their habitat also risks being lost. Through Ingvarsson’s story, our work raises questions about time, responsibility and resistance, and not least about what it means to nurture and take care of the world we all share.

– Pia Rönicke & Johan Tirén

Pia Rönicke, based in Copenhagen, is an artist working with film, prints, sculptures, and objects. In her practice, plant life transcends existing lines of occupation through a recurring process of gathering across various levels. Johan Tirén, based in Stockholm, works with diverse media such as drawings, posters, prints, and video. In recent years, he has been highly active in the public realm—ranging from self-initiated explorations of urban environments and mappings of the colors of nature to permanent artistic installations.

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?