Åsa Helena Stjerna is a Swedish installation artist, using sound and listening as her artistic modes of exploration. Through her site-specific installations, she explores sound’s potential, making the embedded conditions and underlying narratives connected to a place perceivable.

Through perceptually sensitive and transdisciplinary driven approaches, her works create connections between the past and the present, the local and the global, and the human and the more-than-human. By this she seeks to reframe the act of listening, evoking a sensibility of places as complex ecologies.

Several of her projects involve scientific collaboration, exploring how collaboration between science and art can create new artistic formats of listening that deepen our relationship with the world around us.

Stjerna has participated in an extensive number of exhibitions in Sweden and internationally, among other the Transmediale Media Festival, Berlin; the Nordic Music Days, Stockholm; the Ultima Contemporary Music festival, Oslo and the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Her works include several public permanents commissions: Earth Song (2020), commissioned by Stockholm Konst; Sky Brought Down (2017) Sahlgrenska university hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden commissioned by Västra Götalandsregionens konstenhet and The Well (2014) at Swedish Institute in Paris commissioned by the Public Art Agency Sweden.

She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Gothenburg, Sweden (Projet title: Sonic Visions of the Arctic. Duration: 2021-2023. Funded by: The Swedish Research Council). As part of this project, she is visiting researcher at the research group Worldling Northen Art:WONA, Arctic University of Tromsø, Norway.

A Sound Art Vernissage X2 | Åsa Stjerna

Mare Balticum is an artistic exploration of the Anthropocene soundscape in the Baltic Sea. The work is the artistic outcome of Åsa Stjerna’s participation in the scientific research project Baltic Sea Information on the Acoustic Soundscape (BIAS) in 2013. By gathering researchers from six Baltic Sea nations, the research project investigated human-induced noise in the Baltic Sea. Deploying thirty-eight hydrophones, recordings were made at various locations in the Baltic Sea at exactly the same moment every hour, every day, for an entire year. This created a sonic map of the Baltic Sea, allowing researchers to measure the effects of human-induced noise in the sea.

In Mare Balticum, sound recordings from twelve of the different locations in the Baltic Sea have been combined as they were measured at exactly the same time to create a synchronized portrait of the Baltic Sea. Through this, the work spans from the Bothnian Sea in the north to the Öresund in the south, and from the eastern coast of Estonia to the western Danish archipelago. In the installation, marine life, the forces of nature, and the constant presence of human sounds converge – the barely noticeable and that which drowns and silences. In the sound installation, each speaker represents a specific location in the Baltic Sea where recordings were made. Distinct places bleed into one another in the sound installation, sometimes acting as solitary voices and sometimes as ensembles. Together, they constitute a geographic choreography that invites the visitor to move from place to place.

Credits
Andre Bartetzki – Software programming.
Manfred Fox: – Technical concept and implementation.
Peter Sigray: – Scientific coordinator, BIAS: Baltic Sea Information on the Acoustic Soundscape.

Music walk | Åsa Stjerna
gathering at the parish hall

Lamento – the Italian word for lament or mournful song – is a sound work created for a forest. Attentive visitors can hear gentle tones and sounds from eight different pianos, played through eight speakers strategically placed within the forest. Gradually, an endless scale emerges, intertwining with the greenery and blending with the natural sounds of the forest.

With Lamento, Åsa Stjerna aimes to explore the relationship between trees and wood, between nature and culture, and how the wooden objects that surround us all share the same history: having once been living beings in a forest. In this work, she focuses on the piano and its past as a tree, and how this history and existence can be made audible. She experimented with recording tones and sounds generated from the piano’s wooden soundboard and allowed these to meet the forest world they once came from.

By juxtaposing two layers of sound, she aims to make the connection between wood and trees, culture and nature, human and more-than-human, audible. In this work, these elements briefly merge

Created in 2006, Lamento will finally have its long-awaited world premiere at the Kalv Festival in 2024.