BreastNest is a film installation exploring interspecies systems of care, corporeal communication, and inter-dependency. Inspired by invitation to 'The Ridge Salon' as curated and conceived by Katja Hilevaara and the prompt of the 'dawn chorus'.

BreastNest was first presented at The Ridge Salon as a Site-Specific video installation on the 9.5.25.

• Hilevaara, Katja. 9 May - 11 July 2025 The Ridge Salon. [Project]

The Ridge Salon is curated and conceived by Katja Hilevaara, and is a series of conversation-meals held at the curators home.

As described by Katja Hilevaara:

The concept of the Ridge Salon has born out of an interest to challenge, resist and subvert modes and settings in which academic knowledge production and dissemination take place. Facilitating multi-voice conversation (including the voices of the more-than-human participants) around focused research topics in domestic, ‘undisciplinary’ surroundings is a radical feminist action that acknowledges and pays attention to the relational and non-hierarchical modes through which research often is conducted, but not always explicitly recognised. Formalising the process of this kind of communal discourse not only ascribes value and legitimises it, but the discoveries and knowledges gained (as well as the materials gathered through the conversations and ‘call and response’ tasks at the Salons) catalyse new embodied ways of knowing, challenging and un-fixing entrenched forms of inequality that structure the way we read, think and produce knowledge.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39257