Theodor Nymark, Nikhil Vettukattil — Swab Barcelona

Pachinko presented two artists whose practices materialised environmental awareness through direct botanical engagement and territorial analysis within the “Focus Polar-Tropic” framework of the Swab Barcelona 2025 programme.

Theodor Nymark presented work from his series Impressionisms, which employed literal pigment extraction from wildflowers gathered across Copenhagen’s eleven municipal biodiversity sites. These newly established meadows, created with specific seed mixtures to support insect and bird populations, provided the raw material for Nymark’s process. Fresh flowers were stamped directly onto birch plywood panels, allowing their natural pigments to absorb into the wood surface whilst acetone transfers created grid-like territorial markings reminiscent of speculative mapping systems. This process referenced French Impressionist landscape traditions whilst addressing contemporary urban biodiversity crisis and real estate speculation. The resulting eleven panels functioned as both geographical markers of their source locations and abstractions of diminishing field spaces under municipal and industrial pressure.

Nikhil Vettukattil presented two works. A House is not a Home reproduced a mass-market camping tent in thick, beige cotton canvas, hand-painted with the fragmented phrase “passive li e”. The work engaged the fragile boundary between shelter and exposure, permanence and precarity, and how belonging is conditioned by structures—both material and ideological—that determine who is seen, sheltered, or excluded. Reanimist (2024) was an audio work generated from field recordings made in Wayanad district, Kerala, capturing ambient sounds at sunset as bird calls, cicadas, frogs, and monkeys shifted in the transition to night. Recomposed through a custom-coded algorithm and bandpass filters, the piece produced an altered soundscape that remained tethered to its source, playing with familiarity and estrangement and the co-constitutive relationship between nature and technology.

Both practices examined how environmental systems respond to human intervention—whether through municipal biodiversity initiatives in Northern European cities or through material and sonic engagements with landscapes across the Global South. The works created direct relationships with living systems and recorded environments whilst addressing broader questions of territorial control, environmental precarity, and belonging. The exhibition’s polar-tropic axis emerged through these contrasting yet related approaches to landscape, memory, and displacement across different climatic zones.

Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru) is an artist living and working in Oslo. Vettukattil studied at Central Saint Martins in London and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. They are part of the Institute for Scene Experiments.

Vettukattil has exhibited at FELIX GAUDLITZ (Vienna), Kunsthall Oslo, Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), CAPC (Bordeaux), and K-U-K (Trondheim), among others. They are a member of the art collectives Tenthaus and Carrie, and co-curator of MOMENTUM 12 Biennale. Working across sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, their practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in relation to lived experience, including current research on Nordic diet and food trade in the High North, examining class, culture, and ecological nutrition models.

Theodor Nymark (b. 1997, Copenhagen) is an artist and curator. In his practice, he systematically examines the metaphorical and physical conceptions of the environment, engaging with it by exploring the role of spirituality in a post-industrial world. Through a narrative and research-based approach, Nymark addresses the landscape by investigating themes such as art history, national identity, land politics, collective memory, and local architecture, while exploring their interconnections and impact on ecological thinking and governance.