Amber Ablett is an artist, cultural organiser and writer making a home on the island of Osterøy, Norway. Working across performance, text, sound and re-enactment, she asks what it means to belong, and how belonging shapes the ways we are together.

Stepping away from spectacle, Amber often turns to workshops and gatherings as alternatives  to the usual exhibition format. Her ongoing project Hvileåret –or The Fallow Year–, is a long-term exploration of rest, practices of liberation and plants. It has taken shape in various spaces, and now also exists as a book , made with collaborators and filled with exercises and tactics developed along the way. For her, rest is never only physical. It can mean resting from having to defend your right to exist, listening to music in your first language, or taking off your armour and lowering your defenses in a place of safety. Even when it happens in private, rest is not withdrawal. It is part of collective liberation. Her own stories of generational migration and Afro-European descent are where she begins. She thinks critically, slowly, with intention and care.

In this podcast, we follow Hvileåret from its beginnings in the exhaustion and burnout of 2020 and 2021 to the guidebook that is now taking shape. Amber talks about growing up with London allotments, and about spoon-carving workshops, foraging and shared meals  as ways of being together in grief, anger and joy. We ask what it means to listen: not only whose voices are present, but whom we choose to hear, and what becomes possible when a group can sit in silence together. Along the way, we think about compost  and soil as models for organising, pockets of rest, plants and gardens as teachers, home as a lineage of care rather than genealogy, and why art may offer  more room for imagination in the face of urgency.

Listen on the website of Radio Web MACBA. 

Photo credit: Amber Ablett, The Feeling is Mutual, 2026