Monica Ursina Jäger
The Unseen — Fjord Conversations, 2025
Phyto Futures. States of Planetary Being, 2025

Fjords are often rendered hypervisible in Norwegian tourism marketing as spectacular destinations, yet much of what constitutes these sites is invisible to the human eye. In this new commission for across, with, nearby, Monica Ursina Jäger asks how the unseen fjord — those parts of the landscape that lie out of sight or are actively overlooked — can be sensed and understood. Her research reveals entanglements between trade, extractive industry, and environmental change that shape the fjord beyond its surface image.

The Unseen — Fjord Conversations emerges from a period of sustained collaboration and dialogue between the artist and researchers from the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Bergen. At the heart of this exchange are two research trips to the Masfjorden region, north of the city, in March and June 2025, where Jäger and her collaborators brought together artistic and scientific approaches to investigate the deep fjord seabed and its ecosystem.

Jäger’s installation comprises five large-scale textile panels inspired by the fjord’s vertical water layers, as well as sculptural watercolour book objects made from birch veneer and a printed notebook drawn from field sketches and notes. The Unseen — Fjord Conversations proposes new storylines and ways of encountering the fjord, not as a static landscape image but as a site of scientific investigation, industrial exploitation, and cultural imagination — as a complex living geobody that is subject to both natural and human-made processes of change.

A special thanks to Åshild Grana for supporting the project.



Over the past year, Monica Ursina Jäger has also worked with geobiologist Lena Bakker to undertake several field trips in high alpine and arctic landscapes, visiting Norway’s region of Svalbard and the glaciers of Switzerland. Steep slopes, barren terrain, and distinctive lake formations are typical of these places, but they also share a post-glacial state characterised by fast-changing microbial and fluvial processes, within which conditions are emerging for the development of new ecosystems and organisms. Composed of audiovisual materials collected during these visits, Jäger’s new single-channel video installation Phyto Futures. States of Planetary Being offsets aesthetic immersion with geobiological insight to reveal the forms of life that are evolving in the wake of the glaciers’ thawing and retreat.

Moving beyond an anthropocentric perspective on these landscapes, the installation focuses on more-than-human life forms to ask questions about the ways in which these organisms inhabit and, in turn, transform their terrain. Narrating the intricate entanglements between biological and mineral spheres across time, the video’s arc traces the living, the non-living, the dying, the dormant, and even the slowly re-awakening, all of which are shaped within the diversity of microbes, sediments, rocks, fossils, seeds, and plants that constitutes these new post-glacial environments.

Set within Nonneseter Chapel, Phyto Futures. States of Planetary Being offers a meditation on resilience, hope, and transformation, and on the possibilities of adaptation and survival amid ecological change and loss.

Concept and Script: Monica Ursina Jäger in collaboration with Lena Bakker ETH Zürich
Composition and Sound: Michael Bucher
Camera and Editing: Monica Ursina Jäger, Myrien Barth and Michael Zogg
Voice: Lea Whitcher
Text: Monica Ursina Jäger and Damian Christinger

with generous support:
Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council, COPL Centre for Origin and Prevalence of Life ETH Zürich, FONDATION SUISA, Ernst und Olga Gubler-Hablützel Stiftung