Updated conference program posted!

We are nearing the start of the conference, below you have an updated conference program.

The preliminary program here will be updated up until the week before the conference. Room names and numbers in brackets, click for map. To read more about different sessions click Show description.

Open throughout the conference

Art at the End of the World Exhibition
Show description
An exhibition of works created throughout the last year by Art at the End of the World Club attendees and students of the Perspectives on Climate Change CEMUS course. The POCC course educates students on the themes of ecopsychology, art, and narratives related to ecology and environmental crisis. The art club was connected to the course as an open gathering for anyone who wants to creatively explore themes around humans, nature, and the entangled ties between us.

[10 Forum]

Mattias Bäcklin – Månkryss – exhibition

Show description
Mattias Bäcklin’s artistry moves between creation and decay, life and death. Art historical references meet ecology and metaphysics. Inspiration is often drawn from the knowledge the artist has acquired over the years as an ornithologist and insect collector as a hobby. Field notes, childhood memories as well as actual places are woven together with folklore and legends into the fragmentary narratives that recur in the drawings. Human artifacts and buildings, often in ruins, meet mountain landscapes, forests, mammals, birds, insects and organic forms. Civilization and nature are linked together to create a third alternative, on the border between present and origin. While traces of human activity often carry a dystopian undertone, the non-human pristine nature emerges all the more harmonious, like fleeting memories from a more original existence.

Mattias Bäcklin (b. 1969) lives and works in Stockholm. He was educated at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and Konstfack. In addition to numerous group exhibitions, he has exhibited separately at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm, Enköping Art Hall, Tegnerforbundet Oslo and the Drawing Museum in Laholm. Mattias Bäcklin also works with public works in urban spaces, including Trädsläckaren in Solna, Med urskogen in i framtiden in Siegbahnparken in Uppsala and Betongvältor with NUG in Mariestad. In 2021 Tomas Bannerhed’s book En vacker dag (Weyler förlag) was published with illustrations by Mattias Bäcklin. Together with architect Malin Zimm and curator Björn Norberg, he also runs Zimm Hall, a non-profit mobile gallery for art and architecture.

[27 Rosengårdssalen]
Juni Sinkkonen and Henri Jumppanen – Forest doesn’t answer – photo exhibition
Show description
Henri Jumppanen and Juni Sinkkonen present “Forest doesn’t answer” photo exhibition. There is a Finnish saying, “Metsä vastaa kuin sinne huudetaan” (“Forest answers as it is called”) which means that the things we do come back to us in one way or another. It has become more and more obvious that the ecological destruction that the wealthiest of humanity are perpetuating is creating a lot of suffering to all beings on Earth. Our exhibition is commenting on this unforeseen destruction from the point of view of Finnish forests and the loss of biodiversity. Of course ecological and social unsustainability is not characteristic only to Finnish forest industry but a common phenomenon around the world, also in Sweden. Our exhibition offers a platform to experience various environmental emotions and to contemplate the place of human animals in the diverse community of the biosphere.

[11 Stora salen]

Sanctuary of Hope: An open space for stillness, meditation and prayer

Show description
The Crypt (Kryptan) will be open for contemplation, meditation and prayer throughout the conference. Keycard can be picked up in the reception.

[35 Kryptan]

Wednesday August 16

Time
Program
9.00-10.00 Registration and morning coffee

[20 Carin & Thorsten, next to the reception]
10.00-10.20 Ida Lod and Kerstin Bragby Artistic opening
The Sigtuna Foundation and CEMUS Welcome to ClimateExistence 2023!

[11 Stora Salen]
10.20-11.00 Isabella Lövin “On the Oceanic feeling – and the need for a new narrative on the human nature relationship”

Mikael Kurkiala “The responsibility is always mine”

[11 Stora Salen]
11.10-12.00 Isabella Lövin and Mikael Kurkiala Panel with keynote speakers moderated by Alf Linderman

[11 Stora Salen]
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.00-14.00 Jan van Boeckel “When the moment begins to heave and expand in great circles”
Show description
Nigerian poet, writer, philosopher and activist Bayo Akomolafe says: “The times are urgent, let’s slow down.” In my presentation I will explore, and try to follow up on, this paradoxical advice in our time of climate chaos and biodiversity collapse. What might happen, when we, in the apparent state of emergency we find ourselves in, not start by rolling up our sleeves and immediately jump to action? When we instead move away from a fixation on clock time and take a step back? And what may art have to offer here.

Aaron Tuckey Spoken word

[11 Stora Salen]
14.10-15.45 Parallel sessions
Session 1

Enki Inkpen
“Clear as a Bell: A sensory and aesthetic history of eco-social relations in time-keeping”

Show description
Tracing the history of time-keeping devices from medieval church bells to smartphones, the paper investigates how changing perceptions of time has affected how we relate to other humans and the more-than-human in our communities. It explores the role of our bodily senses and the aesthetics of our technology in how we perceive nature, particularly in relation to the culture of consumerist-extractivism. By understanding the history of how we pay attention to the world around us, we see possibilities for how we could relearn to care for our local eco-social communities in a time of globalised and future-oriented attention.

Jenny Björklund & Maja Bodin
“Reproductive Decision-Making in Times of Climate Change – Can I take responsibility for bringing a person to this world who will be part of the apocalypse!?”

Show description
This presentation centers on the issue of family-making and reproduction in relation to global climate change and environmental issues. In our project, we address some of the greatest challenges to a sustainable society?climate change, demographic change and health?as well as how these are intertwined. It contributes with a contemporary perspective to the issue of environmental politics of reproduction, an area that has not yet been much researched in Sweden.

We will discuss our project, which comprises three sub-studies. In the first study we have analyzed how lay people reason around reproductive decision-making in relation to world conditions, overpopulation and environmental issues. The second and third study will explore how the topic is discussed in printed media and by civil society actors.

[11 Stora Salen]
Session 2

Francis Rogers
“Arboreal Locomotion: A History of Tree Climbing”

Show description
The boreal forest which caps the north of the planet is disappearing. Or rather, it is being systematically removed, violently and rapidly. Sweden and Finland lost 19% of their forest cover in the last 20 years, largely felled by state logging companies. In Uppsala, the kommun are taking down a few trees at a time until there will be nothing left of the forests we live between. Under this disintegrating canopy, activists are taking to the trees. Arborial Locomotion is an experimental documentary introducing tree climbing for activism and meditating on climbing as a way to get to know and live with trees.
[14 Karaktären]
Session 3
Ylva Björnberg & Alexander Crawford
“Exploring another sustainability discourse: Sense-making through the predicament”
Show description
This session takes the form of a story of the parallel personal journeys of two seasoned but recovering futurists and analysts, Ylva and Alexander. Flummoxed by reality and frustrated by the conversation on climate and sustainability, they deliberately embarked on an intellectual and emotional rollercoaster of personal discovery, driven by curious minds rather than professional agendas.

Some 100 walks and 100 000 words later, and with the pile of articles, podcasts and books so high and messy, the stream of insights and revelations hit a wall, or fell down a rabbit hole? Moments of clarity but days of confusion, and the more you dig, new layers of mystery reveal themselves. They were left with a shattered, dismembered perception of the world – and new openings toward another sustainability discourse.

In this talk, they will cover both what they arrived at (so far) and how the journey has meandered (until now). Expect oak trees and pine trees, ravens and horses, places and pathfinders.Many threads have been picked up and woven in to the fabric of this conversation.

[15 Framtiden]
Session 4

Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri
“Interactive workshop Learning (with) Plants”

Show description
In our current post-industrial and globalised society, more and more people are experiencing a sense of alienation, in particular from the more than human world. To address these traumas, we will explore the possibilities of Learning(with)Plants. In our interactive workshop we will invite local Sigtuna plants to participate in our space of learning and healing. We will reflect on vegetal intelligence and will question what plants can teach us and how they can participate in our mutual learning? We will be sharing stories, memories, experiences, knowledges and we will co-write (with) plants while shapeshifting into a guest plant, exploring phytography by writing a short story, poem, prayer, opinion piece or creating some other art work.
[17 Tacksamheten]
Session 5

Jan van Boeckel & Ceciel Verheij
“Art activity with clay”

Show description
This workshop, facilitated by Ceciel Verheij and Jan van Boeckel, foregrounds the human hand. It is difficult to receive a gift when we clench our hand to a fist. We first have to reach out and open our hand fully, to be able to welcome it. By doing so, we inevitably make ourselves vulnerable. In this workshop you will be invited to “think with your hands”.
[19 Toleransen]
15.45-16.15 Fika and exhibitions
16.15-17.00 May-Britt Öhman “Sámi and Feminist Technoscience perspectives on Settler Colonialism in (Un)green, Climate-(Un)friendly Disguise”

[11 Stora Salen]
17.00-18.30 Pre-dinner program

    Exhibitions
    Moderated conversation with artist Mattias Bäcklin and Vilma Loustarinen 17.45-18.15

    [27 Rosengårdssalen]
18.30-20.00 Dinner
20.15 Jacek Smolicki Discord, MA (2023, 35 min)
Show description
This is a multi-channel soundscape composition exploring past and present soundscapes of Walden Pond, popularized in the 19th century by the Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The piece critically engages with the dominant, romantic perception of the site and seeks instead a more complex and transversal form of attunement with the layers of its natural and cultural history. Thoreau’s diligent work on bringing our attention to natural environments (and their soundscapes) would not have been possible without his reliance on extractivist industry, graphite mining to be more precise. Therefore, the piece’s departure point is a pencil, similar to those manufactured by his and his father’s factory. The pencil represents the tool with which Thoreau used to map the pond and its surrounding territory and then write and edit the passages of his influential book. Today, graphite constitutes the major component of batteries used in a number of devices that surround us, including sound recording equipment through which some of us – environmentally-concerned artists and researchers – try to bring attention to the effects of climate change and Anthropocene. The piece focuses on this paradox and on how one’s silence is always someone else’s noise. The work is entirely based on field recordings made within the last year in the immediate and remote vicinity of Walden Pond through various creative and critical engagements with the site and its history.
[33 Bibliotek]
21.00 Open mic

[27 Rosengårdssalen]

Thursday August 17

Time
Program
7.00-8.30 Breakfast
Optional walk with Alexander Crawford, meet in reception 7.45
8.30-9.30 Dougald Hine “Making Good Ruins: The Work of Living at the End of a World” (also livestreamed online)

[11 Stora Salen]
9.30-10.00 Fika
10.00-12.00 Stephen Jenkinson and Anita Goldman In conversation (also livestreamed online)

[11 Stora Salen]
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.00-14.30 Parallel sessions
 
Session 1

Jörgen Andersson, Gabriel Liljenström & Pella Thiel
“Workshop: Join the rights-based regenerative revolution”

Show description
Two movements stand out as radically hopeful in an era of climate dispair. Regenerative agriculture and rights of Nature appear, at first glance, to be separate creatures, but are they really?

The particular exploitation of nature labelled as “agriculture”, has been carefully legislated since dawn of civilisation. Access to land and division of its revenues defines us at the core of our identity. But “regenerative agriculture” defined as “enabling highest imaginable vitality in ecosystems, by satisfying human needs”, and acknowledging the legal rights of Nature does change our appearance in the world. Both frameworks connects human needs with the living whole.

Are we living in times when landscapes, calling for its people are being heard, again? Is the rights of Nature framework protecting human rights in a society of degradation and turmoil?

Let’s explore the topic together with three climate renegades and leaders in their fields: Gabriel Liljenström, Jörgen Andersson and Pella Thiel.

[14 Karaktären]
Session 2

Åsa Callmer
“Social (im)possibilities to consume less”

Show description
Social relations play a crucial role when people aim to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle. Our relations are entrenched with norms, rituals, and habits that often act as obstacles to sustainable choices. But social networks can also, if supportive, facilitate a transition to alternative practices and lifestyles.

In my presentation, I will talk about an ongoing study at Örebro University where we follow individuals who aim to reduce their consumption. Through qualitative interviews and follow-up memory notes from interviewees, the aim is to learn more about the obstacles and possibilities experienced throughout their process, focusing on the role of social relations. Special attention is given to the ways in which social relations and networks may help foster a sense of contentment in a consumer society that thrives on, and reinforce, our appetite for more.

Henrik Ohlsson
“Facing Nature: Exploring the Borderland between wellbeing, Environmental Activism, and Spirituality”

Show description
As part of a larger project studying nature relations around the Baltic Sea, I have conducted an ethnographic study among practitioners of forest bathing, nature awareness, and similar practices in Sweden and Finland from 2018-2021. These practices occupy a borderland between wellbeing, environmental activism, and spirituality, where experiences of, and attitudes towards, nature, are consciously exercised. Based on in-depth interviews and participatory observations in this milieu, I will explore the notion of existential health, a notion that, in my understanding, connects wellbeing with the constitution of the ethical subject. In the practices that are included in my study, I observe how existential health is pursued through the cultivation of an experience of being alive in a living world.

Eléonore Fauré
“Rough Guide Skåne – A fictive tourist guide to a decarbonised Scania”

Show description
Sweden is to become a fossil-free welfare state by 2045. But what might it mean and for whom? In this session, I will present the recently completed project ‘Rough Guide Skåne’ in which we have been using creative techniques of futuring to explore what a decarbonised society might look like in a specific place, with examples from the Skåne region in 2050. I will talk about the process of making the guide, share some insights from the guide and invite conference participants to a discussion on how lives in a decarbonised, just and sustainable society might be made more tangible, engaging and relevant as well as more open to public input.
[15 Framtiden]
Session 3
Dougald Hine
“Making Good Ruins: The Work of Living at the End of a World”
Show description
Workshop exploring and expanding on the themes from the keynote talk.
[17 Tacksamheten]
Session 4

Ida Idaida & Malin Zimm
“ClimateExistence Karaoke”

Show description
ClimateExistence Karaoke is an opportunity to share an emotional relationship with the changing world. Karaoke, the empty orchestra, is a moment of reflection and for a mutual emotional expression between the performer and the audience.

Ida Idaida explores karaoke as an artistic and social practice, and together with Malin Zimm, they create a a safe space for expression, communicated in music. The performer presents their choice of song and a reflection about how the song relates to the theme climate existence: as consolation, care, contemplation.

The sharing and interaction of singer and audience generates a certain energy, a memory that lingers in space and an emotional investment in the moment itself. Singing is an existential language and a mode of investing the body in the message.

[29 Sällskapsvåningen]
14.30-15.00 Fika
15.00-15.30 Jacek Smolicki “More than Ears. Listening as an Environmental and Existential Practice”

[11 Stora Salen]
15.45-17.00 Avskedsbyrån Ars Moriendi A Ceremonial Last Farewell of the Climate Goals, followed by a Farewell Reception

[28 Olaus Petri kapellet]
17.00-18.30 Pre-dinner program

    Exhibitions

    Jacek Smolicki Lake that Glimmers Like Fire (2021, 15 min) 17.45-18.00

    Show description
    Is a soundscape composition that builds on a series of listening and recording sessions undertaken in, around, and with Rissajaure, a lake in Sápmi, a region in the Arctic Circle traditionally inhabited by Sámi people. The lake has been often described as the clearest and purest one in Sweden. The piece focuses on a troubled sonority of the region that surrounds the lake and has been permeated by noises of extractivist industry, military activities and increasing tourism. Intending to deconstruct the perception of the lake as the purest one in the country, the piece also brings attention to noise and disruption that the very practice of field recording might be causing across various scales and geographies.

    [33 Bibliotek]
18.30-20.30 Dinner
21.00 Stephen Jenkinson and Gregory Hoskins concert, A Night of Grief & Mystery 2023 World Tour

Show description
A Night of Grief & Mystery combines stories and observations by author/culture activist Stephen Jenkinson, drawn from his decades of work in palliative care, with original songs/sonics by recording artist Gregory Hoskins. These two Canadian artists have been exploring the intersection of their work for 8 years, across 3 continents, in 3 recordings and 2 short films. They come to the road now in 2023 as they did in the beginning: the two of them, a singer and a storyteller, out into the mystery days. The year will bring the pair to Israel ,USA, Scandinavia, UK/Scotland, Australia/New Zealand before travelling across our home country, Oh Canada.

Concerts for Turbulent Times they surely are. Not poets, maybe, but the evenings are poetic. The Nights are musical and grave and raucous and stilling, which probably means they are theatrical. Love letters to life are written and read aloud. There’s some boldness in them. They have that tone. These nights have the mark of our time upon them, and they’re timely, urgent, alert, steeped in mortal mystery. They’re quixotic. They have swagger. What would you call such a thing? They called it Nights of Grief & Mystery.

[11 Stora Salen]

Friday August 18

Time
Program
7.00-9.00 Breakfast and check-out of rooms (check out no later than 9.00)
9.00-10.30 Parallel sessions
Session 1

(p)Art of the Biomass
“Toxic Heritage, or How to Wash an Island”

Show description
We bring a story about an artificial island in Sweden that most people never have heard of. The island exists because fertilizers exist. This post-industrial, readymade sculpture created from phosphogypsum stands as a monument over the future optimism of yesteryear, when the green revolution set out to feed the world. Through re-visiting this island and its legacy together with you, we wish to contemplate what kind of heritage it could be said to be; what it asks us to remember, and what kind of ceremonies or economies it might inspire for the future. The session combines film, lecture performance, and co-created speculative storytelling. Special workshop guest: Eléonore Fauré from the virtual Rough Planet Guide to Zero-Carbon Skåne.
[11 Stora salen]
Session 2

Third task
“The role of youth and education in the transition”

Show description
For ClimateExistence, we will facilitate a workshop in the form of a round table discussion. The topic for the discussion is the role of youth and education in the sustainability and climate transition. The theme of the discussion is introduced through a short presentation,followed by a screening of short fragments from one or two of our episodes related to the topic discussed. We will then moderate the roundtable discussion.
[14 Karaktären]
Session 3

Christoffer Söderlund Kanarp
“‘Your research or my tinkering won’t help’ – on (the lack of) adaptation imaginaries in the Swedish Arctic”

Show description
Imagination is particularly interesting and important in climate change adaptation, as it by definition is future oriented. Understanding collectively held imaginings of the future in relation to the climate crisis is thus key to understand adaptation practices today.

This presentation draws on a study of visions of the future as expressed by civil servants working with adaptation in the Swedish Arctic. The study finds that the dominant imaginary instead of centring the climate crisis, downplays or outright omits climate change effects. Notably negative indirect and transboundary effects are commonly excluded to retain an economic development imaginary assuming increased resource extraction, tourism and green tech innovation.

Johan Gärdebo & Isak Stoddard
“How could a societal transition be imagined and enacted otherwise”

Show description
Urgent calls for a global, rapid transition to fossil-free futures has in Sweden inspired the adoption of a climate policy framework with the ambition to reach net-zero emissions by 2045. As national emissions remain high, increasingly vociferous calls for accelerating the transition can be heard from both state and non-state actors. At the same time, local resistance to many top-down, climate
related policies and projects can be seen from different segments of Swedish society. With inspiration from the worker-oriented Gräv-rörelsen (Dig where you stand) of the 1970s, along with philosopher Simone Weil’s thinking on attention and roots, as well as the mimetic nature of social change described by sociologist Gabriel Tarde, we ask how could a societal transition be imagined and enacted otherwise?

Based on extensive interviews with representatives of local parties in 130 Swedish municipalities, we begin an exploration of possible lines of flight away from both petroleum-induced cultures and the vices of control-based, climate (smart) transition politics.

[15 Framtiden]
Session 4

Ida Lod & Kerstin Bragby
“A mythological/ personalized journey, inspired by the Sufi Poem The Conference of the Birds”

Show description
Workshop – A mythological/personalized journey, inspired by the Sufi Poem The Conference of the Birds – exploring how to collectively move together as an art in life – in response to the existential crises of the world – from within each individual’s spark and calling in the world.

We will concentrate our focus to the body, the breathing and the senses in the here and the now. We will ask ourselves intriguing questions and through movement, body and space, voice, improvised singing, words and our imaginative power mirror forth strengths in each other and create a collective, improvised and instant piece of art.

We confront the paradox in that we do not need to be alone, in what we only can do by ourselves. We will explore how we can become a movement, that act in the outer world, as it learns together with others from within the source, to become the wise way in relation to our existential crises.

In the Sufi Myth and story called; ”The conference of the birds”, the Hoopoe Bird (Härfågeln) summons all the birds in the world to a meeting due to an existential crisis in the world, in which the person representing the governing principle – the Prince – is gone missing. The bird suggests though, that they do not search for governance in the form of the prince, but that they all set out on a collective quest through the seven great valleys, governed by each individual according to their own calling – to find Simorgh – the wisest bird in the Universe.

[17 Tacksamheten]
Session 5

Enki Inkpen & Art Club at the End of the World
“Hearing the Ice Howling”

Show description
A gathering for anyone who wants to creatively explore themes around humans, nature, and the entangled ties between us. With an ecological theme to guide the session, we create and share art of any medium (visual, poetry, film, music etc), and any level of experience is welcome. We aim to cultivate a supportive and emotionally open space where it is possible for people to express eco-grief and anxiety through creativity, while leaving room for hope. Despite the title, your work does not have to be about the end of the world!
[19 Toleransen]
10.30-11.00 Fika
11.00-12.00 Pella Thiel “Legally hacking the Machine – Institutions for a dignified human presence in Earth”

[11 Stora Salen]
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.00-14.35 Mikael Kurkiala, Patricia Lorenzoni and Mattias Olsson Panel discussion moderated by Malin Östman “What is yet to reveal itself and how do we differentiate between the stars and satellites?”

[11 Stora Salen]
14.45-15.30 Ida Lod and Kerstin Bragby Artistic closing

[11 Stora Salen]
15.30-16.00 Fika