STATEMENT
Eric Ellingsen started Species of Space (SOS) in 2009. Ellingsen's practice centers in space activism. SOS twists tools from many different bodies of knowledge. These bodies emerge as thick spatial narratives entangling art-architecture-landscape architecture-poetry-choreography. Ellingsen's work is informed by collaborative learning through experienced experiments, relational thinking, walking, ecology and ecological economies, translation, performance and perception.The heart of Ellingsen's work involves learning how to learn. This takes place through the design of site and institution specific works in which learning learns across different creative spatial practices. These projects involve growing languages and the ability to translate meanings across disciplines. Through articulated contact with lives of people, places and things, we amplify a sense of empathetic encounters with the complex politics and stories at play in the world today.
From 2009–2014, Ellingsen co-directed and taught in the Institute for Spatial Experiments, a 5 year education project started by the artist Olafur Eliasson, affiliated with the University of the Arts, Berlin. Semester long co-teaching experiments partnered with the University of Addis Ababa (Alle School of Fine Art), Science Po (Bruno Latour), ETH (Guther Vögt), and Harvard GSD (Sanford Kwinter).