Welcome to The Lost Archives of Falck and Brandt, an alternative natural history created by Stockholm-based artist Ida Rödén.

The Lost Archives of Falck and Brandt

In the eighteenth century, the world was being mapped, collected, and named at an ever-accelerating pace. Naturalists travelled across continents in search of the unknown, describing new species and filling collections with plants, animals, fossils, and minerals. The natural world was gathered, ordered, and given names.

Yet not everything could be made to fit.

Some things resisted classification. Some were overlooked, forgotten, or left without a name.

In this exhibition, we encounter two eighteenth-century naturalists: Jonas Falck and Jon/Joanna Brandt. Their stories unfold through real places, actual discoveries, scientific theories, and documented observations. Yet woven into this historical fabric is something else.

Jonas Falck appears as a self-taught naturalist and a rejected pupil of Carl von Linné. Travelling from place to place, he gathers animals, fossils, and traces of species long since vanished. His notebooks record anatomical anomalies and fossils that resist the systems through which natural history sought to make sense of the world.

Jon/Joanna Brandt’s research emerges from the polar expeditions of the eighteenth century. In 1773, a research assistant named Jon Brandt joins an expedition towards the North Pole. Behind the name is Joanna Brandt, disguised as a man so that she can take part. With sounding line and lead, she turns her attention downward, towards the world beneath the ice—a landscape on the seabed that has yet to be seen.

In the exhibition, we encounter the traces they left behind, recreated by Ida Rödén: drawings, notes, and objects inspired by natural history. Among them are extinct species and underwater landscapes that do not yet exist above the surface of the sea.

Falck and Brandt have no place in the history of science. They never existed.

Their archives, however, have been reconstructed by Ida Rödén.

Ida Rödén (b. 1981, Härnösand, Sweden) is an artist based in Stockholm whose practice moves between imagination, history, and scientific observation. Through drawing, sculpture, text, and installation, she creates speculative worlds that explore how knowledge is produced, recorded, and remembered. Her work often takes the form of fictional archives and dialogues with imagined historical figures, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Rödén holds an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and a BFA from Umeå Art Academy. Her work has been exhibited in Sweden and internationally, and she has participated in the 2023 ARTofMELT polar research expedition aboard the icebreaker Oden. She is also the editor of the art magazine Volym and is active as a curator in Stockholm.