The Land of the Green Insects

in cooperation with Natasha Dahnberg

Uppsala konstnärsklubb, Gallery 2

Uppsala, Sweden

2025

A Postmodern Tale in Text, Image and Gold

The exhibition begins with an unexpected discovery made by artists Natasha Dahnberg and Ekaterina Sisfontes during a field study in Roslagen in the summer of 2025. In an old binder marked with the initials E.P., they found a faded diary and hand-drawn illustrations of insects—some rendered in green pigments, others nearly erased by the passage of time. One of the drawings bore a striking resemblance to a rare fly documented in Uppland in 1849.

The material evokes clear connections to Sten Eklund’s The Secret of the Kullahouse, in which the scientist J. M. G. Paléen claimed to have discovered an abandoned yet technologically advanced society hidden in the Swedish countryside. Paléen insisted he was entirely alone—but the binder suggests otherwise. Who was she, E.P.?

One summer, artists Natasha Dahnberg and Ekaterina Sisfontes traveled through Roslagen—a landscape where forest meets sea, and where old barns and garages often hide small flea markets filled with objects once cherished but now forgotten. It’s a familiar pleasure to wander, rummage through these things, and let oneself be carried away by the winds of history.

One day, among piles of photographs, folders, and worn paper sheets, they spotted a package that stood out. It was carefully wrapped, almost elegant, as if someone had wanted to preserve something valuable. When they opened it, they found a folder with a simple monogram: EP.

Inside lay a diary whose pages were so faded that the text was barely legible—but the words that could still be made out carried a strange tenderness. Alongside the diary were several images of insects. Some still bore traces of color, while others had lost all pigment, nearly vanished against the yellowing paper. It was as if time itself had whispered over them, slowly erasing the visible but leaving something even more enigmatic behind.

The insects had peculiar bodies. It was impossible to tell whether they had sprung from EP’s imagination or were some kind of scientific studies, like those entomologists make during fieldwork. Had EP drawn them? Or had someone else filled the folder with these strange images? There was no way to know—and perhaps that was precisely what made the discovery so fascinating.

One of the insects resembled the flying species documented by English researcher J. M. G. Paléen during his journey to Sweden in 1849. The image is now part of the Uppsala Art Museum’s collection, and it was artist Sten Eklund who made Paléen’s peculiar story of The Kulla House known.

Paléen claimed to have found a puzzling area, surrounded by a magnetic field and filled with technical constructions—plant cultivations, solar collectors, mine shafts. The place was abandoned. He documented everything meticulously but never encountered another human being. When he later tried to return, he could not find it again, and within academia he was ridiculed and called a dreamer.

But the artists’ discovery suggests something else. In the material they uncovered one summer in Roslagen, traces of a presence emerge—someone was there, in the very place Paléen called empty. Her name was Elisabeth.

Natasha Dahnberg with help of AI The Land of the green Insects

Eleonora Ernestine Paléen (1838–1902)

Born in Bath, England, Eleonora Ernestine Paléen’s childhood was shaped by an unusual scientific expedition. She was the sister of the eccentric naturalist J. M. G. Paléen, who in the 1840s traveled to Sweden to investigate the technologically advanced yet abandoned settlement later known through The Secret of the Kullahouse. While her brother studied the site’s magnetic fields, machines, and architecture, young Eleonora collected insects in the surrounding forests. She sketched unusually large and strangely shaped flies with such precision and care that their memory would live on in her art for decades—appearing as motifs in brooches, hairpins, and pendants crafted in gold and enamel.

After Paléen’s discoveries were dismissed by the scientific community and the site was lost, Eleonora returned to England to pursue her education. She studied at the Government School of Design in London and continued her training in Paris and Copenhagen. With a unique blend of scientific curiosity and artistic vision, she developed a design language that fused metalwork with botany, ornamentation, and scientific inquiry.

Following several years as a designer for the jeweler John Brogden, she opened her own studio, Mrs Ahlgren’s Art Jewels, where she created pieces inspired by plant cells, seed pods, and insect wings. Her work drew significant attention at the World’s Fairs in Vienna and Paris, and was worn by both aristocrats and thinkers within the emerging women’s movement.

At the same time, she became an active advocate for women’s rights. She founded a women’s reading society focused on the natural sciences, lectured on the craft of goldsmithing at the Royal Society of Arts, and participated in the International Congress of Women in 1899. She contributed articles to the Women’s Suffrage Journal and was a close friend of Lydia Ernestine Becker.

Eleonora wove together art, science, and feminism into a coherent way of life. She kept her shop windows empty—not as a gesture of modesty, but as a shield for ideas still in motion—and signed her works with her own name at a time when female creativity was often rendered invisible.

When she passed away in London in 1902, The Illustrated London News described her as “a master of letting nature speak through metal.” Her work still bears traces of the forest of her childhood, and the large insects that once crawled across her sketchbook at the edge of a forgotten land.

Text by Natasha Dahnberg

Natasha Dahnberg is based in Uppsala, working as an artist and curator at the Uppsala Art Museum. Her work revolves around themes of memory, loss, and cultural belonging in times of upheaval.

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