Åsa Sonjasdotter
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist, researcher, writer, and social organizer based on the island of Ven in Sweden and in Berlin. In her practice, Sonjasdotter investigates the relationships between crops, their nourishing generosity, the tensions around power, politics, and the narratives they trigger, and not least the ways in which social organizations mobilize and form coalitions around their cultivation.
Sonjasdotter's artistic work is driven by the urge to engage in material-narrative processes to end violent relationships through food and land. Having grown up among monoculture fields in the highly industrialized agricultural region of southern Scandinavia, she has an embodied experience of what such relationships do to people, habitats, waters and soil. Furthermore, it was in this region that a “universally applicable” technique for growing monocultures was invented. This technique now forms the basis for the legislation imposed by global seed companies on farmers worldwide. The topic is explored in more depth in the 2022 film “Cultivating Abundance”, which was made in dialogue with the seed association Common Grains and small-scale seed breeder Hans Larsson. For about two decades, Sonjasdotter has been working to restore small-scale knowledge and food relationships.