MADELEN ISA LINDGREN

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TO ALL THE SPROUTS THAT CHANT AT NIGHT
Solo Show
17 - 19.04.2025
SPJELD
Oslo, Norway

To All the Sprouts That Chant at Night

[...] and so I listen to the electricity of the vibrations, the last substratum of reality’s realm,
and the world trembles inside my hands.

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, 1973

How do protection and resistance take form in vulnerable processes? Change is inevitable, but we can ask ourselves how we respond when cycles older than timekeeping itself continue to be put under pressure by ideologies of accumulation and expanded control. Madelen Isa Lindgren approaches going forward by looking towards aspects of the past. She explores how Earth’s recurrent shifts can be understood as value systems that we once were more in tune with. Her studies of transitional phases in both nature and culture are brought into her sculptures, where they are materially processed. She refers to them as parts of a sculptural journal – observations that are transferred and transformed into spatial shapes.

In To All the Sprouts That Chant at Night, the artist dives into a new branch in her exploration of how value is defined and how this in turn manifests itself materially. In the sculptural scenography presented, spouts of glass are seemingly stretching towards the sky. Lindgren has rendered the seedlings in a liminal phase – no longer seeds lying protected by the earth, not yet bloomed into maturity. This attentiveness to ongoing processes and reoccurring cycles, echoes writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s notion about the narratives we use to tell stories and make sense of the world: “[…] its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process”.1 The fragility of the sprouts are portrayed through the glass as they are growing from the dark soil, represented as circles of leather, a material inherently intimate. Strands flow out from beneath them, like roots, tentacles or the hyphae of fungi. They seem to reach out towards each other and intertwine.

Closely linked to the spatial works, are the artist’s coin- shaped amulets. Through the study of small-sized carriers of iconography and symbols, Lindgren draws inspiration from alternative cosmologies and rituals where the material and immaterial are closely intertwined through spiritual connections. In this sense, the artist approaches the coin or amulet in a similar way as Le Guin used what she called talismanic maps – as something symbolic, powerful –
locating where one is in the landscape of time.2 Throughout the centuries, maps and coins have been used as tools in missions of territorial control and capitalistic trade. In the hands of Le Guin and Lindgren, such entities instead become vessels – or carrier bags3 – containing philosophies that preserve knowledge from the past and advocate for a cosmic order focused on sustaining rather than advancing at all costs. The maps and amuletic works use a speculative cartography, serving as inventions of alternative realities, through which we can imagine how current worldviews may be reformed, changed or even replaced.

In the above quote from Clarice Lispector’s novel Água Viva, the narrator refers to how she listens to music – by gently resting her hand on the record player. This sends waves through her whole body, and she describes a sense of the world trembling in her hands.4 Throughout the novel, the narrator aims, and often struggles, to capture the experience of being, which is fluid, flowing and continuously changing shape. Letting go of linearity and accepting this vastness, may help to ground us in time and place – welcoming a sensory presence with attentiveness to physical surroundings. As the sonic vibrations of music anchor Lispector’s narrator in her sense of being connected to the world, Le Guin’s people of the Valley locate themselves in time through their talismanic maps. Similarly, Lindgren’s sculptural journal connects the material and corporeal to the historical, the cosmological and the spiritual. She encourages us to listen for the chants of our surroundings, so that we to, may feel the trembles of the world.


Text by Marthe Yung  Mee Hansen

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