Silje’s blog - Soil Building
Soil Building Matters

This page is a form of compost heap. I am at the moment in the process of breaking down and reconfiguring experiences from my work with soil and composting for the past couple of years. We are in the warm composting phase, where things change quite fast, right now. So no text is fixed. No layout is final. I hope you will enjoy the process with me. 

Making soil in your home, workplace or neighbourhood, is a very practical way of doing something to repair a tired planet, nurturing plants and millions of microbes you can’t even see, as well as nurturing yourself and the people around you. There are more organisms in a handful of soil than there are people on earth. You are working closely with these communities of microbes to create new soil. You will get to know them even if you can’t see them. They may warm you, break the organic matter down slowly or fast, depending on who is in charge. You will smell them, you may learn which enzymatic activity creates which smell, feel the changing textures, from liquid to dry, crumbly parts, depending on what is being broken down, how much oxygen there is, how humid it is. 

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Silje’s blog - Composting in Awkward Spaces
Composting in Awkward Spaces: Project, Workshops, Talks


Since an artist residency with Metropolis in May 2024, I have been exploring how to communicate the warmth and importance of the soil building collectives to other humans, carrying out a number of exploratory composting and soil making workshops and talks, rooted in my urban composting practice. 

- Metropolis Artist Residency May-June 2024 
- South Sweden Design Days with Holding Surplus House, May 2024
-  Presentation at ‘Broken World Building - Future Prospects for a Fragile Architecture’, Symposium by CITA, Royal Danish Academy, May 2024 (With work from my first post doc - see “Looking for Home” section this page)
- 5 part compost course at Kulturhuset Islands Brygge, October-December 2024
- Royal Danish Academy, Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape, November 2024
- Copenhagen University, Urbanism Studio seminar ‘Soil - Regenerative Practices Relating to Landscape Architecture’, December 2024 
- CBS Permahaven, Copenhagen Business School, lunchtime talk, February 2025
- ‘Wandering and Wondering‘ workshop - edition 1, Roayl Danish Academy, April 2025

Upcoming: 
- GRASP festial, September 2025 - “Resting with Soil”, in Call for Rest
- CAFx ‘Wandering and Wondering’ workshop - edition 2, October 2025


Silje’s blog - Bokahsi Composting
Bokashi composting: How to

Bokashi composting is a two-step composting process, which can be done entirely in an indoor ecosystem. This allows for a very intimate relationship with the processing of nutrients, a very intimate relationsip with the surplus produced and reproduced. 
The first step in putting your left-over organic matter form cooking, into an airtight container from which you can drain the liquid and supllying it with effective microbes in the form of inoculated bran, every time you add a layer. 
After letting the microbes work on the fermentation for at least two weeks without opening the lid of the container except for draining the excess liquid, you can then mix the ferments with equal amounts of worn-out soil in an open container twice the size of the closed one. This is the soil factory.

More on the bokashi composting process to come here soon. 
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Silje’s blog - Tired Architecture
Tired Architecture: A Speculative Platform for Otherwise


“Tired Architecture// Uses of Utopia The work is an architectural exploration of home, housing and human settlements in times of exhaustion and burnout. We can no longer endure ‘cities on speed’, cities in constant ‘liveability’ competition or cities on laughing gas. The capitalist spectacle of the grand financialization of the housing market has gone haywire, and we are tired. Cities are tired. People are tired. The planet is tired. Architecture is tired.

We need hope. We need rest. We need care.”



Tired Architecture Conversations I and II
were held in Det Lilla Rum, Copenhagen, June 2024 with suppoert form the Danish Arts Council and Dreyers Fond. 
One day there will be a publication from these wonderful gatherings, exploring the meaning of tired architecture across artistc disciplines and formats. 

Tired Architecture Circles gathered people in my home to share a space for tired people interested in exploring the tiredness as a collective and creative force. 

Documentation to come. 
Silje’s blog - Looking for Home
Looking for Home: A life of research  


This is the page for all the previous housing and urban research I have been doing over the years. The continuity in my work is the persistent search for meaning in the way we inhabit the world. I have studied housing cultures in Asia, Africa and northern Europe for my whole adult life, since my first Bachelor project based on a fieldwork grant to go (back) to Nepal in 2000. 

At the core of this work is a deep personal longing for home in a strange world. Starting out from a position of culture and social science, then becoming an architect and urbanist for a long time placed in a field of housing studies, the search has more recently led me out in the wider landscape, down into the ground and the conceptual and material way we world worlds. The way we build relations to the life around us and organise our entanglements of settlement and reproduction, is the way we inhabit the world and create meaning. Soil making is another chapter in the search for home, for strategies of inhabitation in an exhausted messy world.       

For the following selected projects, links with more info coming soon...

“Diversify Now!” Industrial post doc with Tegnestuen Vandkunsten proposing alternative collective housing models for Denmark

The Macuti House in Ilha de Moçambique: Transforming the Other Side of a World Heritage Site - Ph.D Project

Gateterminalen 1:1 community built mock-up and street level participatory planning office for new bus terminal in Ålesund, Norway

Home Space Maputo: Meanings and Perceptions of the Built Environment in a Rapidly Expanding African City

Masanga Hospital staff housing pilot project, Sierra Leone

A Textile Workshop on Sollien Farm, Norway


Full publications list and CV