Eva Löfdahl: I am back in Stockholm now. The Ridgeway walk was about 160 km. As the name says, there is a ridge, of chalk. It has been the most suitable way to travel from the Stone Age and on. The ground is well drained and it has no dense vegetation. There are many traces of activities. Huge earthworks, Grim’s ditches 6 km long with high walls, a series of hillforts able to contain whole villages; in Avebury already, the Romans destroyed the magic of the place by making a road crossing in the central ring of stones, but it is still very impressive.

I don’t know how communication affects my work process because I have almost never pursued it in process. I have felt it easier to change my mind, let it jumpier I don’t have to explain why.But I think work will be about communication, so I may try.

One thread is about paths. over time I have tried to read the subject, but these texts tend to gain either of two directions, either a Situationist drift towards getting lost or an accumulated overlay of singling-like narratives. And I am not onto a religious path, if it sound so, but something much more practical, basic and existential, to find the best way.

Beside my field practice of trekking, which has never directly led to any artworks, I have been in contact with the Agricultural Department of the University of Uppsala to get laser scan maps. Looking at these is like looking at Mars, but it easy to find marks of water and civilisation.

Another Thread is antennas. this summer I saw one I thought be used for an installation. So far this idea not taken off. Instead umbrellas with safety pins. Handy, but too thin to be seen at a distance

–Eva Löfdahl in conversation with Stephen Lichty. 2018

“This veering between the archaic – invocations of stargazing or ancient methods of orientation – and the constantly receding horizon of new technologies is characteristic of Romm’s work. A full wall of nine of the Parable dishes overlooked his more recent show, Hibernation, at the library space Tranen in north Copenhagen, though here each was punctuated by a trilobite fossil. Scattered on the floor throughout the building were a series of low polystyrene boxes, titled Sarcophagi, offering an alternative form of library: the pleasing scent of the star anise, cardamom or cinnamon that sat in some of the boxes being distributed by small ventilation fans, or in others mace spray or plastic earplugs imbued with synthetic grapefruit oil. The drawings here seemed to illustrate Romm’s vision of a possible future more directly, peopled with humanoid figures sprouting countless tubes and complex organic machines producing who knows what gloop.

Romm also works within the group Diakron, an assemblage of artists, designers and thinkers, who have set up Primer, an exhibition series hosted on the premises of the biotech company Aquaporin in the Copenhagen suburbs, positioning their group shows – which mix things like medieval biblical woodcuts, midcentury-modern designs and contemporary art – as a form exploratory research that might benefit those in a lab coat or an artist’s smock. Among these various activities is an open-ended looking that isn’t focused so much on where we’re going as on summoning the spirits in science and the atoms in art, and embracing the tentacled chimeras we create along the way.”

–Chris Fite-Wassilak, “Amitai Romm, selected by Chris Fite-Wassilak”, Future Greats, Art Review, February 2018.