Intermedia Practice
Creating environments, staging situations, and exploring multiple coexisting realities
I create and document environments at multiple scales. My artistic practice has unfolded over many years in intertwined strands of image-making, material work, live art, poetic writing, and spatial installation.
I stage situations and explore environments. The works allow multiple realities to coexist, interact, and become experientially present.
I create spaces where different realities meet.
Some works begin with found situations and material traces: a sign being absorbed by a tree, plastic left to weather in a backyard, light falling across a painting, or an animal encountered as roadkill. Other works create environments and stage situations through live action, projection, moving image, participation, and spatial composition.
Brændeskov (2017). Photographic study.
Surfaces recur throughout much of my practice. Skin, plastic, cloth, glass, paper, water, paint, tables and screens are membranes where bodies, images, materials, and environments meet.
Much of my practice is intermedia: A painting becomes a projection screen. Bodily movement becomes a video recording. The video is frozen into a still image. The image is mounted on canvas and becomes part of a spatial installation. Live actions move between private exploration and public event.
I work with translations of body, image, media, text, and surface in space. The different media are perceptible and they simultaneously also enter into, amplify, distort, translate and transform one another.
Exchange (2017). Three-channel intermedia video installation. Installation view, SAK Kunstbygning, Svendborg, Denmark.
My work explores how multiple realities coexist, interact, negotiate, and become experientially present. An animal may simultaneously appear as material body, cultural memory, scientific specimen, pet and mediated image. A room may simultaneously be a former learning environment, material archive, studio, exhibition, and imagined galaxy.
Driven Pheasant (c. 2015). Intermedia projection installation. Found video and sound projected onto Pheasant Killed by Text (2013): acrylic paint and pheasant feathers on translucent plastic and wooden frame. Duration: 12 minutes.
The works create interstitial spaces in which different bodies, materials, environments, and ways of sensing and knowing can act upon one another. I stage situations that bring together several media and modes of expression. Some unfold live; others are made for the camera, documented, written, projected, or installed. Staging, layering, mediation, performance, and projection are central to how I work.
Anatomy–Galaxy. Nature–Culture. Organism–Environment. Human–Nonhuman. Thinking Through Things. Creating Situations.
Recurring themes of inquiry
Environments and scales
I work with environment as image, installation, ecology and room.
Scale shifts:
- surface and membrane;
- body and garment;
- artwork and room;
- organism and habitat;
- institution and infrastructure;
- landscape and planetary ecology.
The practice is multiscale, moving from the corporeal to the cosmic.
Anatomy Galaxy (2026). Site-responsive intermedia installation in a former anatomy teaching environment. Video still. Videography: Jasper Svabo.
Surfaces, interfaces, and membranes
Skin, plastic, feathers, cloth, glass, paper, water, paint, tables, and screens appear throughout my work. These surfaces receive, filter, carry, and transform bodies, images, light, and information. They become interfaces through which different realities encounter one another.
- translucent plastic;
- skin;
- animal skins and feathers;
- trampoline membrane;
- glass and windows;
- water and liquid;
- canvases and screens;
- garments;
- paper;
- projected light.
A surface is rarely merely exterior. It receives, filters, carries, distorts, or produces relations. This connects the early paintings and photographs directly to the larger projects Exchange, Driven Pheasant, Pheasant, Sheep, Frog, Anatomy Galaxy.
Angel in Crystalline Memories of Deep Time (2026). Digital photograph made during Claus Spangsberg’s exhibition Crystalline Memories of Deep Time, Rundetaarn, Copenhagen. Photograph: Connie Svabo.
Multiple co-existing realities
A lot of my work brings several realities into the same situation. The works allow these realities to coexist and negotiate without settling into a single version:
- pheasant as living animal, quarry, roadkill, feathers, painting, video, command, and cultural practice;
- frog as organism, roadkill, specimen, liquid body, and projected image;
- anatomy as lived body, scientific object, teaching practice, architectural residue, and galaxy;
- plastic as packaging, waste, trace, landscape, archive, surface and image.
Several realities are held together in the same work. Their relations remain active, mediated, and open to negotiation.
Poetic writing, narrative, and hybrid forms
Poetic writing is a central strand of my practice. I work with prose poetry, literary nonfiction, visual and graphic text, and shifts of voice, time, place, scale, and reality. Narratives move between the documentary and the fantastical, grotesque, and monstrous.
In works such as Knowledge Catcher and Anatomy Galaxy, writing is not separate from the visual and spatial work. It enters the environment as documentation, material, image, performative score and graphic form.
Nature–culture and more-than-human relations
Animals, organisms, materials, technologies, and environments participate actively in the work. Pheasants, frogs, ants, acacias, bunnies, sheep and salmon appear through encounters with cameras, projectors, petri dishes, back yards, scientific laboratories and natureculture histories. Their different ways of being present complicate familiar divisions between nature and culture, organism and environment, human and nonhuman.
The work asks how human and nonhuman worlds are sociomaterially entangled and enacted.
Live art, participation, sensing, and knowing
My performance practice ranges from public actions to one-to-one encounters and private situations. It includes live art, participatory performance, performance for the camera, and documented actions. I document these encounters in text, images, and recordings.
Some works invite people to eat, wear constructed garments, fold paper, co-perform, or contribute in other ways. Participation and performance are part of the artistic material.
These encounters explore how sensing and knowing emerge through collective, choric communication situations. Such swarming situations create and are environments.
Science Lunch (2021). Participatory lunch environment. Ordinary canteen food presented in Petri dishes, test tubes, laboratory bottles, and flasks. Concept and staging: Connie Svabo. Food arrangement: Lisbet Foged.
Traces, remains, memory, mortality and transformations
The environments in my work are full of residues:
- consumer plastics;
- animal remains;
- found scraps;
- old signs;
- marks left by anatomy containers;
- childhood objects;
- abandoned furniture and infrastructures;
- journals and documentary images.
These traces allow absent bodies, environments, and times to remain present. Materials also travel between forms. A lunch becomes an image, the image becomes part of a project blog, the blog documentation becomes part of a research essay, which becomes part of a book. The work forms the center of a creative circuit, galloping from gut to galaxy.
