Nature’s activists squaring the circle

Nature’s activists squaring the circle

 

Photos and text by Francesca Romana Rietti

 

Ulfborg, Tuesday 4^th of August 2026

 

 

 

We are sitting around a big table in the semi-darkness of the living room of the cultural centre Lystbækgaard, founded by the Danish shepherd Berit Kilerich. Here today the third edition of the itinerant Art-Nature Lab will begin. Outside the Danish sky is blue, full of light and of fluffy and withe clouds constantly moved by a strong wind. Inside we are a bunch of people, still quite sleepy, arrived from Argentina, Denmark, Guatemala, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Serbia and Sweden to learn and exchange techniques and knowledges with masters and artists coming from different fields. Antonella Diana (Scenographer, Visual Artist and leader of Teatret OM’s Scenographic Lab) presenting them found the way to evoke with an image their common ground: “They are all nature’s activists”, she said.

“When, walking in a forest, you find a piece of wood or a stone – she continued – you can’t impose them anything. You just have to respect their shapes, listen to what they want to tell you and discover how to stay in dialogue with them”.

This is the first and the huge political low of wisdom we could already deduce from the environment.

Listening to the stories and the fights that Berit Kilerich told us, we discovered the same path, dialogue and respect. I could add strength. Berit told us that there were no shepherds in her family, just some sheep that her mother looked after on a small patch of land. When she was around 15 years old, she saw for the first time a man shearing a sheep. “I can do it better” she thought, and from that moment on she studied and studied trying to learn as much as she could to be a better shepherd. Now is the moment of passing the knowledge from one generation to the other. She opened a School mostly for young people who wants to continue her legacy of no aggression to the nature and learning the Danish ancient shepherd tradition that was almost getting lost. Young people can come and stay for a week or more for a very accessible fee and be part of the family (sheep included): they’re thrown straight into the adventure, which even involves sleeping outdoors alongside the sheep and in the middle of the Danish nature.

Led by Beril through the fields where she grows the plants and flowers from which she extracts pigments used to dye the wool, we then reached a small yellow house at the far end of the woods. It was there that we took part in the workshop run by ET4U (Contemporary Visual Art Projects Association in Vestjylland) entitled Squaring the Circle – A visual process about coexistence.

Quoting from the text that the artists’ collective read to us: “Using a limited supply of reclaimed and discarded pieces of wood, we will collectively create an abstract and ever-changing picture of how we might coexist in a democratic, cultural and pluralistic society. Our country is confined to an area of 19.64 square meters. Its boundary is defined by a circle with a diameter of five meters and a circumference of 15.7 meters… As a society, we are compelled to engage in shared reflection, collective decision-making, and genuine collaboration. … Our ambition is, of course, to remain in a constant state of transformation. … We seek to maximize each participant’s contribution and influence while avoiding the emergence of private territories”.

For almost three hours under a warm sun and a wild wind we have been building – sharing many doubts and discussions – our city and in its centre we erected a theatre with free entrance for the audience.

The day we spent together led us to discover, very concretely, how working in relation with the nature could transform an artist in an activist, and an action in a cultural and political act: squaring a circle making the impossible possible.