Linnea Langfjord Kristensen (b. 1991, DK) lives and works in Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam. She is an award-winning artist working between performance, text, and film supported by scenographic installations. Her work has been shown and published nationally and internationally including The Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Cockpit Theatre (London), Martin Asbæk Gallery and Teater Får302 (Copenhagen). She has an MFA from the Royal College of Art, London (2020), as well as a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (2017).

– Can you tell us why we ended up in a horse stable? What’s your connection to horses? Do they have a place in your artistic practice?

Horses have been part of my life since I was six years old, so they’ve never really been symbols to me. They’re simply other beings I’ve spent a great deal of my life with. On most days I spend four or five hours with Bowie. In my teenage years it was seen as this super uncool thing to be “a horsegirl” and I was really embarrassed, but now I’m proudly uncool about it. It’s just the most amazing thing ever. Because of that, I sometimes feel conflicted about the way horses are represented in contemporary culture. They seem to have become something of an aesthetic trend, and I think the lived relationship with horses can easily disappear behind the image.

Horses don’t care about productivity, deadlines, or success. They simply ask you to be present and listen. Horses can’t be rushed or optimised. Trust, communication, and care take as long as they take, regardless of what I want.

That’s also why I don’t work with horses as a subject in my artistic practice, even though they have influenced the way I think. Horses are not “for my work”. Being with a horse is a meaningful relationship that isn’t primarily organised through language. Listening to a horse and learning what it needs is a slow process, and what it needs is not necessarily what you need. The horse didn’t choose to be where it is, we made that choice, so I think we have a responsibility to make its life as good as we possibly can.

In line with much of my research, I’m careful not to project my own human understanding onto horses. I’m interested in being in relation with them, not in claiming I know what it’s like to be one.

– How would you describe your artistic practice today? What are the primary themes and questions driving your current work?

My practice moves between performance, writing, scenographic elements and artistic research, but it is consistently driven by questions around how realities are performed into existence through relations, language, and value systems. I am interested in the social, economic, and institutional structures that shape what becomes visible, believable, and possible, often long before we become aware of them.

Much of my recent work examines the relationship between performance and production. I have looked at startup culture (having worked in one), AI development, documentation, and the art world as systems that increasingly perform things into existence before they materially exist. I am particularly interested in how these systems reproduce (and often naturalise) the world-logics folded into them. I approach performance as a way of understanding how products, technologies, institutions, and values are continuously rehearsed, staged, and maintained.

In Flowers and Swine, for example, I looked into how the buzzwords of the early 2000s (hustle culture, endless growth, and optimisation) have migrated from the startup world into the arts and everyday life, shaping contemporary ideals of ‘a meaningful life’. It continues my broader interest in how social and institutional value systems become internalised and lived out through everyday desires and actions. In parallel, projects such as ROI (Return on Investment) and MVP (Minimum Viable Product) investigate what happens when documentation, marketing, or representation precede the work itself. Can you document something into existence, without it ever existing?

This line of inquiry currently continues in a forthcoming book chapter, in which I analyse AI through the lens of long-durational performance rather than as an autonomous technology or simply at the level of its outputs. Drawing on my experience as both a performance artist and someone who worked in AI startups, I argue that AI is a performative process stretching from development to runtime, shaped by hidden labour, infrastructures, economic incentives, and value systems. Those conditions do not remain outside the technology and are instead folded into the aesthetic objects it co-produces with artists.

Across these projects, I keep returning to the same concern: how dominant value systems become folded into everyday life, and how artistic practice might make those folds visible, unfold them differently, or choose to reproduce what they appear to challenge or transcend.

– In your thesis The Poetic and Performative Fold, you argue that dependence can be understood as inherently emancipatory. Could you briefly outline this idea for our readers? And conversely, do you think that dependence itself can also become a mechanism of domination or control?

I wouldn’t actually say that the dissertation argues that dependence is inherently emancipatory.

In The Poetic and Performative Fold, I was trying to challenge a deeply rooted assumption in contemporary society: that independence (and the values associated with it) is inherently positive, while dependence signals weakness or failure (often framed as a character trait and made personal). Drawing on thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Fernand Deligny, and the cooperative the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, I argued that no one exists independently anyway. We are always constituted through relations, institutions, and other people. The ideal of complete independence therefore becomes a never-ending quest, leaving us in a perpetual sense of lacking whatever is imagined to make us fully independent and finally, “becoming a real person”.

One of the things that interested me was how the language surrounding independence is closely tied to contemporary ideas of productivity, work, growth and success, while dependence is often linked to idleness, weakness, or failure. Those aren’t neutral descriptions. I traced the genealogy of “independence” and “dependence”, and their historical use. These reflect much broader value systems that celebrate a pursuit of progress at the expense of anything and everyone that stands in its way: people, the planet and the more-than-human world. That raised a question for me: how could one resist those dominant ways of organising life without simply reproducing them in another form?

That ties directly into the second part of your question. I would argue that the stronger mechanism of control is not dependence, but the ideal of independence itself. If complete independence is impossible because we are always constituted through relations, then independence becomes something we are endlessly encouraged to pursue but can never fully achieve. That perpetual sense of lacking keeps us striving to become more productive, self-sufficient, and economically valuable. And that’s a powerful mechanism of domination to keep people in. Separating people from one another and encouraging them to see themselves as self-sufficient individuals yet to realise this potential is, I think, a far more powerful mechanism of control.

For me, the question is therefore not whether dependence is good or bad, but what we are made dependent upon (here independence), who benefits, and how they reproduce or transform existing world-logics.

–Your work frequently discusses language as a producer of reality. What aspects of reality do you think resist language altogether?

I can’t speak on the behalf of anyone else, but in my own lived experience, there is always something that exceeds language. But the moment we try to name it, we have already captured it in language and it has been transformed into something else. That paradox fascinated me. Therefore, I am interested in those moments where language begins to fail and doesn’t make sense, where meaning falls apart and something cannot be fully resolved into words.

I have been very inspired by Lacan’s notion of the Real to think through this: not “real” as in “reality” in the everyday sense, but “the Real” as that which resists symbolisation. If there are aspects of experience that cannot be fully captured by language, then language is no longer the only measure of what is meaningful, intelligent, or valuable.

That was what interested me in Deligny’s work. Rather than treating the children he was working with as lacking something (here, language) and therefore lacking something essential, he asks what kinds of relations, knowledge, and ways of being become possible when language is no longer the primary organising principle. He is also careful not to claim authority over experiences he cannot inhabit himself. Because he experiences the world through language, he accepts that there are aspects of the children’s lives that he can never fully know or translate into his own terms. He allows that difference to remain and to remain unresolved. I find that shift incredibly generative because it challenges dominant assumptions about what counts as a meaningful life.

Because language is never neutral, objective, or universal, no single language can ever exhaust reality. There is always a remainder that escapes our descriptions.

– Can you tell us a bit more about how do you start with the new work, how do you start carving your ideas?

I almost never begin with a finished idea. I usually begin with something that doesn’t quite make sense to me such as a contradiction, a sentence, a behaviour, or a value that seems to be accepted in everyday life that I don’t understand. Then I want to trace and understand where it comes from, and basically know everything about it: its genealogy, etymology, historical development, related concepts, and the worlds it has helped produce.

I spend a long time reading, writing, collecting examples, and following where that contradiction or doubt leads. Often, I give myself a form from the beginning which the work will be, for example a performance, a series of diagrams, a workshop or something else. I find it easier to think about a question and do research “within a form”.

Working in a startup, for example, made me wonder why companies were able to market and even sell products that didn’t yet exist. That observation eventually led to works like ROI, MVP, and, years later, my book chapter on AI and durational performance. Similarly, Flowers and Swine began with noticing how startup buzzwords such as “hustle culture,” “endless growth,” and “full potential” had quietly migrated into the arts and everyday life.

Looking back, I realise that I rarely invent entirely new questions. Instead, I keep returning to the same ones from different angles. Each project unfolds something that was already folded into the previous one. Over time, they become less like separate works and more like one long conversation.

One thing that’s also very important to me is working with other people, especially in performance. I always collaborate with directors, performers, actors, and non-actors. I’m not precious about my work and seeing it being interpreted in real time is really fascinating to me. Others always interpret things in ways you hadn’t predicted, they see things you don’t see, associate in different ways with each other. To me that’s one of the most valuable parts of the work. It’s a beautiful thing to get to observe. I like deliberately creating conditions where my own thinking can be challenged.

– You graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and then continued your studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Did that feel like a natural continuation of your artistic development, or did moving between those two institutions reveal tensions or contradictions in the way they approach art and artistic education?

In many ways it felt like a natural continuation, but moving between the two institutions also highlighted how art schools are not neutral environments. They each have their own language, values, assumptions, purpose for existing and ideas about what success looks like. Some place greater emphasis on conceptual development, others on professionalisation and networks.

Rather than focusing on those differences as contradictions, I see them as different world-logics, each producing particular kinds of artists and artistic practices. I have never been particularly interested in deciding which approach is “better.”

To me it was really valuable to be embedded in different institutional contexts and I’ve learned a lot from both places.

London has an amazing art scene and there’s so much to experience and participate in, but I found the city itself really difficult to live in. I couldn’t justify the quality of living – cost of living and financial stability versus having time to create art – so I moved back to Amsterdam.

– You are currently working at SAR. Could you tell us a bit about the institution and the kind of work that takes place there? How does it relate to, or influence, your own artistic practice?

Working at the Society for Artistic Research provides a very interesting vantage point. As an international organisation, SAR brings together artists, researchers, universities, conservatoires and cultural institutions from around the world through different initiatives, journals and conferences. Beyond supporting the field through those initiatives, it is also engaged in European advocacy around the recognition and funding of artistic research. It’s fascinating to witness how artistic research is moving into broader policy discussions, for example through new European Commission’s Horizon Europe calls and ongoing negotiations around future research funding.

So, rather than seeing artistic research from the perspective of a single institution or discipline, I’m constantly exposed to hundreds of different practices, methodologies and ways of producing knowledge. As the Communications Officer, a large part of my role is communicating these activities and helping make artistic research accessible to members, institutions, policymakers and the wider public. This means I’m continually asking: how is artistic knowledge communicated without flattening it? I’m incredibly passionate about this because there is so much great artistic work and research out there, but if it is not communicated outside itself, then most people never have the opportunity to engage with it.

I would therefore say that the relationship between SAR and my own artistic practice is communication – thinking carefully about how ideas are conveyed, how different audiences engage with them, and how meaning is created through different forms of expression. In that sense, both involve finding ways to communicate complex ideas without reducing their complexity.

– What are your thoughts on the Amsterdam art scene?How has being part of WOW Lieven shaped your artistic perspective or professional network?

To be honest, I don’t feel qualified to comment on the Amsterdam art scene as a whole because I’m not particularly embedded in it. Much of my work is developed from home and tends to circulate in other countries and contexts, rather than through a local gallery network.

What WOW does really well is recognising that artists also need the practical conditions to sustain a practice. It’s easy to think of artistic practice as something driven purely by creativity or individual determination, but anyone actually working in the field knows that that’s not the case and that the practical realities matter enormously. Affordable housing has become increasingly difficult to find. Having access to stable, affordable accommodation creates the time and continuity needed to develop work that often unfolds over several years, rather than constantly having to prioritise short-term survival.

– Financial sustainability is a major concern for independent artists. How do you navigate this challenge while staying true to your political and artistic values?

Like many independent artists and researchers, I combine my artistic practice with other work. I actually enjoy having a job alongside my artistic practice. It connects me to people, conversations, and worlds outside my own bubble. It also means that my artistic practice doesn’t have to justify itself financially or constantly prove its value in economic terms. It can remain a space for long-term research that might not have an immediate outcome or market.

One thing that has become increasingly important to me is first-hand experience. Some of the environments that have shaped my work, such as startup culture, are built on value systems that differ radically from my own. Yet working within that world gave me an understanding I could never have gained through reading about it alone. It taught me how those systems actually function from the inside: what motivates people, how decisions are made, and how particular values become normalised in everyday practice.

I think it’s important to place yourself in contexts you are critical of before forming conclusions about them. Otherwise there is a risk of reproducing assumptions rather than understanding the complexities of why people participate in certain systems in the first place.

Today, I feel very fortunate to work for the Society for Artistic Research. It allows me to contribute to a field I care deeply about while earning a living. Because not every meaningful artistic idea should have to justify itself through the market, having that separation provides the freedom to pursue questions simply because they matter at that moment. And not because those questions must be financially viable.

– What five elements do you consider essential for building a sustainable long-term artistic practice, both creatively and practically?

• Curiosity (starting with something I don’t understand).
• Time (long-term research without immediate outcomes).
• Material conditions (housing, income, stability).
• People outside your bubble (different disciplines, first-hand experience).
• Remaining willing to change your mind (not being too attached to my own opinion).

If I finish a project believing exactly what I believed when I started, then I probably haven’t learned very much

– Where do you see yourself, both artistically and personally, over the next few years? Do you work according to a clear plan, or do you prefer to let intuition guide your path?

I’ve never been someone with a strict five-year plan. Looking back, almost none of the things I’ve done happened because I carefully planned them. They happened because something appeared, a question happened, someone asked me to do something, or I found myself thinking, “Why not?”. I’ve learned to trust that kind of curiosity.

What has remained consistent, however, are the questions I’m interested in. The contexts change. So I tend to follow questions rather than plans.

I think intuition plays a role, but it’s not intuition without direction. It’s more that I try to remain open to situations and questions that challenge my assumptions or place me in unfamiliar contexts.

– How do you recharge creatively and emotionally?

I spend a lot of time with my horse Bowie or sitting next to the paddocks on a bench, also when it’s raining. I like rain.

– If you could be reincarnated as a plant or an animal, what would you choose—and why?

I don’t believe in reincarnation, so I’d struggle to answer without borrowing a belief system I don’t actually hold, which would feel disingenuous. I’m also quite wary of anthropomorphism and projecting my own human desires onto plants or animals. I don’t want to assume I could possibly know what it means to be another form of life. I’d rather acknowledge that difference than erase it. I think understanding begins with accepting the limits of your own perspective. Part of respecting other forms of life is accepting that there are aspects of their existence I can never fully access. That there are aspects of their existence that simply aren’t for me and trying to force some kind of access, to me, feels like a form of violence.

Photos by Roman Ermolaev