A humming landscape of snow and fells is surveilled, its flowing processes quantified and visualized into datasets. The datasets are passed on to a global information network, a pulsating cloud of numbers surrounding the Earth. Its goal being:

“To create the most ambitious, globally distributed, and systematically collected dataset to date”

 

The keeper cares for the machines that survey the landscape. Every week he treks a lonely path up a fell to the tall metallic structures. He refills their fuel and shields them from reindeer and snow. Not too long ago it was him and not the machines that looked out over the fells and observed the flows of the land.

 

The film moves between fermenting in primordial juices and animals taxidermied into forever petrification. It explores how a visual language concerned with information rather than aesthetics emerges from the scientific field, abstracting nature's signifiers into symbols. 

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The short film Diorama is the result of a residency at a biological observation station in subarctic Sápmi in 2024. The film mythologizes the fieldwork that has been conducted at the station since the 1960s and examines how science abstracts natures' processes into symbols.

The Helsinki based organization Bioart society facilitated the residency ARS Bioarctica at Kilpisjärvi Biological station. Partaking in the residency was made possible with funding from the Cultural Fund for Sweden and Finland, and Konstnärsnämnden- The Swedish Arts Grants Committee. The film was finalized with the help of Inter Arts Center, Malmö.

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Script, direction & photo - Ellen Bjerborn

Music & sound design - Gabriel Prenbo

Voice of the Keeper - Matti Sumari

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Special Thanks​

 

Ana Bothelo

Bioart Society

Duncan Geere

Kilpisjärvi Biological Station

Leena Valkeapää

Margot Edström

Oula Kaltoppäa

Paul Khadra

Silvia Hüttner