Austra Apsīte

A Hundred Years of Listening – A Quiet Mythopoetic Field Guide to Entering the Sensory Body of the Oslofjord 📍 NMBU Campus, Vitenparken 📅 23 April 2026 🕕 18:00–21:00 🌿 Language: English and Norwegian We will ask: How do we begin to listen again to our fjord, as the breathing, sentient animals we are? This evening event invites you into a quiet, mythopoetic field guide for sensing and encountering the living body of the Oslofjord. Through guided listening, shared reflection, and artistic practice, we begin a long-term cycle of attunement – to place, to memory, and to more-than-human life. This is the first gathering of a multi-year journey. Together, we will explore what it means to listen beyond the human perspective. What happens when we enter the fjord through the sensory worlds of her beings – the barnacle, the harbour porpoise, the blue mussel, the plankton, the eider duck, and the Greenland shark? How do we learn to be in right relation? Who are our kin? Who is already speaking here beside us? The workshop introduces the first being of the cycle – a presence we will collectively tune to over the coming year. This moment marks the beginning of an unfolding practice of attention, storytelling, and stewardship. 🍃 Program • Panel discussion • Listening with the body • Poetry • Restorying the fjord 🍃 You are invited This workshop is for the people of this watershed: the artists, researchers, students, and anyone curious about deep listening, ecological storytelling, and new ways of relating to place. It is an invitation to slow down, to sense differently, and to begin a shared practice of remembering with the fjord. 🍃 The event is free. Sign up at vitenparken.no/event #100yearsoflistening #noba #oslofjorden #vitenparkn

During these quiet months, we have slowly started to create an Oslofjord Listening Deck. A card deck designed to create a space where stories can be shared, held, and remembered. A Hundred Years of Listening is a practice of remembering what it means to be in right relationship with our fjord, with each other, and with the more-than-human world. We are here to listen to stories emerging from the glimmering inlets, sun-speckled beaches, and shadowy depths of the Oslofjord. This listening deck is one of our humble attempts to imagine what the Oslofjord can once again become by hearing what she once – not so long ago – already was. This is our attempt to begin restorying the Oslofjord. Design&Photography: Austra Apsīte Artwork: Martin Lee Mueller Photos taken from a memory gathering workshop at Vitenparken Ås

First frost, an old knit and a cabin in the expansive forests. From a couple of months ago.

Ours is a home of books, and records, and fossils, and feathers. 🪶

Bunnefjorden in the inner Oslofjord is freezing over. Closer to the edge of the ice, the wind will still stir up waves that then echo through the frozen water, creating the eerie sight of waves made of ice. Through and under the not-yet-frozen cold water, a family of harbour porpoise make their way towards the depths of the inner Oslofjord. The answer to what has brought them so far in probably lies somewhere under the waves. But what will keep them here is visible above, where we stand on the edge of the fjord. The wind shifts and waves of ice close in on this little family of whales. The silky backs rise one after another as they try to find a way through the ice. One — two — three— four —… we try to count as we look through the binoculars. Yesterday there were eight. The ice now stretches for kilometres on all sides of their little breathing hole. Their dives are not long enough.

We live in a time when the silences of the more-than-human world are becoming deafening – not because there is no longer anything to hear, but because we have forgotten how to listen. The Oslo Fjord, once alive with the pulsing rhythms of herring, eelgrass, and harbor porpoise, now suffers ecological collapse. We believe that healing begins not only with science or policy, but with attention. With listening. With the steady, reverent act of turning toward the world, year after year, asking not “what can we take?” but “who is here?”, “what is being said?”, and importantly, “what is being asked of us, the human kin and participant?” 🌙

Season of fires, stories, poems and quiet. 🌛

I really need to see a sunrise, I said. Our friend understands such needs, so he led us up over the treeline in the pitch black of the late august night. «Here you should find a nice rock to sleep on. Come down for a morning coffee,» he says «I’ll make some eggs too,» he adds as he walks back into the darkness of tree cover.

A little from the summer here in Oslo 🌼

This needed to be here. As a landmark in time. My beautiful village.

Hi 🌼 I have finished and defended my master’s thesis in philosophy at UiO! 🌼 This is a conversation between phenomenology, sound ecology, poetics, ethnography, anthropology, folklore, deep time and mythology. But mostly I was just — — writing through my place. Performing the intuitions and thinking them through carefully. One thought at a time. Asking what is the importance of all these rituals, of all these songs and traditions. Only to discover the deep ontogenic relevance traditions grown of careful attention and reverence hold. This piece of writing is my practice of attention. 🌼 If you would like to hear more about it, to continue the conversation — let’s talk!!

Chapter One • Homecoming of Geese Thick fog quietly moved around us. And yet, we stood there, waiting for the morning sun. And somewhere from that depth of obscurity—geese. We could not see them. But here they were—announcing their place with voice. They were flying home. ——Words by Austra Apsīte, visual poem created by Ausme.