“I am a collector. I always have been. Stones, stickers, figurines of various kinds, comic books, and now, as an adult, mostly planks, sticks and textiles.”

What is it about a stick that makes you want to take it home? Its shape, its colour, the place where you found it? For Geir Backe Altern, the urge to collect has followed him from childhood into his artistic practice. This autumn, his work Pinner fra landet (og utlandet) (Sticks from Home (and Abroad)) comes to Nordnorsk Kunstnersenter, alongside a selection of planks from his collection Planks of My Life. He will travel north with these in his luggage. Other planks are already waiting in Svolvær, gathered in and around the town during a visit in May.

Together with textiles and rope, these materials become part of what Backe Altern calls “site-specific carpentry constructions”. He looks around, assembles and adapts his work to what he finds before him. The lengths and shapes of the planks influence the structures, which develop in response to the space's architecture. Mistakes and chance occurrences can become starting points for further work. Plans may change right up until the opening. What emerges belongs to this particular space and will not be reconstructed elsewhere.

He describes his artistic practice as a perpetual dérive, a journey guided by chance encounters and impulses, drawn towards colours, objects, places or architecture that catch his attention. The concept is associated with the Situationists, an international movement that, from the 1950s onwards, combined artistic experimentation with radical social critique. Through walks that broke with the fixed routes of everyday life, they explored how the urban environment shaped people's movements and actions. Play was also central to their ambition for people to take an active part in shaping their own surroundings and lives. Backe Altern shares a related interest in discovering and experimenting with alternative possibilities within what already surrounds us.

The forest has long been a recurring subject in his practice. Since 2009, he has been working on the project På leting etter elementer til den perfekte skogen (Searching for Elements of the Perfect Forest). It began with the idea of acquiring a piece of woodland and spending an entire lifetime making it perfect. However, the perfect forest has no single, definitive form. Different needs, interests and experiences lead us to value different qualities, and what is ideal for one person may be undesirable to another. Over time, this search has given rise to an expanding forest archive of sticks, pine cones, photographs, texts and objects depicting forests. It brings together both materials gathered from the forest and images of what a forest might be.

“Fundamentally, it is about play, intuition, obsession, material excess, the urge to work and an abundance of energy,” he writes. “And about getting in over your head as a method.” How far can you get with what you have collected? And what happens if you keep going further? His constructions have affinities with artistic approaches in which experimentation reshapes the rules, and solutions emerge through the process of making. Getting in over your head reflects a willingness to begin without knowing exactly where things will lead, and to let the challenges that arise determine the direction of the work. What his collections will become in Svolvær is something he will discover through working in the space itself.

Geir Backe Altern (b. 1978) studied at the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art and holds a master's degree in Art and Public Space from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. His practice encompasses installation, sculpture, performance and interventions in public space. He co-founded Kurant Visningsrom in Tromsø and is involved in the artist-run exhibition space Sentrum senter for samtiden in Oslo.

The exhibition project was selected through North Norwegian Art Centre's open call. The jury consisted of Simen Engen Larsen, Vegard Johannessen and Adriana Alves.