For the University of Stavanger’s new geothermal energy station, HAC, appointed by KORO, commissioned artist Anna Rún Tryggvadóttir (IS) to create a site-specific artwork that resonates with the station’s function and environment.

The resulting work, How to Breathe Rock, takes the energy center’s many 300-meter-deep wells into the earth as its starting point. In the form of a guided audio meditation, it invites the audience along for a contemplative reflection on our often-overlooked yet so essential connection to the geological world beneath us.

As an immersive, meditative experience, the work invites the public to reconsider their relationship with the environment around (and beneath) them. On campus, visitors can engage with the piece by scanning QR codes installed around the site with their phones. The work’s theme of interconnectedness is reinforced by the fact that the very devices used to experience it may have been charged with the energy generated from the geothermal station itself.

When you enter the building that keeps you warm, you are entering a three dimensional space made out of materials that were once inside the Earth: the iron structure, the aluminum facade, the plaster, ceramic, clay and raw pigments in walls and flooring, the glass windows and the entire electrical grid.

Excerpt from How to Breathe Rock, 2024, Anna Rún Tryggvasdóttir.

Click here to experience the work.