As it was announced via our project partners the BioArt Society, we selected and decided that within the proposals submitted to Rewilding Cultures project and mobility grant as the second grantee on the behalf of Radiona.org will be curator Björn Kröger.

Björn Kröger is a curator of the Palaeontological Collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Associate Professor at the Helsinki University, Finland. He earned his PhD at the Freie University of Berlin, Germany and worked in Germany, France, and Sweden. He is an expert on the evolution of the oldest cephalopods. His current research focus is on the early evolution of large-scale ecosystem engineering. He has also an active interdisciplinary interest in how our knowledge on earth’s deep time is gained, narrated, and used.

Photo: Björn Kröger

His major research focus is on the macroevolution of Paleozoic non-ammonoid cephalopods (“nautiloids”). His field experience is in the Ordovician of Estonia, Norway, Sweden, and New York, and the Devonian of Morocco. His current scientific activities are concerned with mechanisms of the diversification during the Ordovician Radiation, and the role of cephalopods in marine Paleozoic ecosystems.

Kröger will travel from Helsinki to Poznan and Germany to visit anthropologist Małgorzata Z. Kowalska and visit the Lake Niedzięgiel (central Poland) and Lake Stechlin (Germany) together with her. The two lakes are homes for the threatened stonewort, fresh-water algae, which form meadows on shallow bottoms of clear and unpolluted lakes. 

Rewilding Cultures (RC) is a Creative Europe collaboration project, which wants to reposition the wild within the field of art practices connecting to science and technology. As the European cultural sector has been and still is affected by multiple subsequent and coincident crises (incl. COVID-19, war-induced inflation, migration) we need to rewild on terms fit for the present and future.

Rewilding Cultures is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union, which aims to support European projects in the field of cultural production and innovation. The partner associations include ART2M / Makery (FR), Bioart Society (FI), Catch (Helsingør Kommune) Center for Art, Technology and Design (DK), Cultivamos Cultura (PT), Ionian University (GR), Radiona (HR) Schmiede Hallein (AT) and Projekt Atol (SI) which leads the project. More information on the project available on the Rewilding Cultures website.