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This contribution presents a series of artistic practices that reflect different aspects of indigenous placemaking. Common among several indigenous cultures is a relationship to land based on principles of reciprocity, where giving and taking is a mutually beneficial practice. This challenges many Western cultures’ tendency to mainly consider land from a utilitarian perspective, prioritising extraction for shorter-term economic gains over more long-lasting values like connection, co-habitation and co-existence. Centring indigenous research, the aim of the panel was to examine the intricacies of placemaking based on principles of relationality and reciprocity. How can we re-think our relationship to land through the practices of art, design and architecture?

To respond to this question, artist and researcher Lisa Nyberg invited Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian architect, for her commitment to indigenous resilience and the displaced, and her question on how to host on hostile lands; Geir Tore Holm for his experience as a Sámi farmer, teacher and artist, to share how to create community through food and storytelling; Katarina Pirak Sikku, Sámi artist, to share her research on the horizon of grief, and her intentions to write herself into the landscape; and Marit-Shirin Carolasdotter, dancer and choreographer with Sámi and Kurdish heritage, because of her knowledge of the body and the land through her research project “Humans and Soil”. Nyberg hosted the panel as the firekeeper.

This issue of PARSE explores how artistic research can respond to and represent different aspects of the dynamic interplay between more-than-human forces and culturally resilient structures. As we are situated within Sápmi, the lands of the Sámi people, this question can not only be explored within the academic structure, but in connection with land, culture and community. The contributions have been selected from the broad range of research presented at Hurricanes and Scaffolding: Swedish Research Council Symposium on Artistic Research, hosted by UmArts and held in Ubmeje/Umeå in December 2024. Drawing inspiration from Nora N. Khan’s contrasting concepts of “hurricanes and scaffoldings” as developed in her essay “Towards a Poetics of Artificial Super Intelligence”, artistic researchers identified the frameworks, practices, perspectives and themes that their practice can bring to the broader discourses of society, environment, technology and politics. This issue draws attention to a small sample of the extraordinarily diverse practices and methods employed in contemporary artistic research. The following editorial map includes artistic responses by each co-editor to the Hurricanes and Scaffolding theme.

In this presentation, I will reflect on the artistic process of drawing a landscape of relations starting from Mårtensliden – a homestead in South Sápmi/Sweden. The drawing Släktlandskapet shows the migration patterns of the people who have belonged to this place, both Sámi and settlers, and aims at setting the scene for a new origin story to be told that counteracts the Swedish settler-colonial narrative. 

The drawing is printed as a puzzle of 22 square pages, presented in a box, and is distributed as a gift to people living today who have a connection to Mårtensliden. The process of making and distributing Släktlandskapet raises questions like: How do we start an artistic research project based on principles of reciprocity? How does an ethics of aesthetics manifest in the making of a drawing – in the tension between transparency and opacity, colour and white space, inscription and erasure? Who gets included in the refiguration of land that is contested (navigating ownership, stewardship, and the call for “land back”)?

This work is part of my post-doctoral research project “To Know and Be Known by (a) Place – Pedagogies of the Unknown on Site”, that documents how artistic practices that consider our relationship to site-place-land can support practices of reconnection, in and beyond times of settler colonization.

This workshop examines how we, as teachers of artistic practice, incite study1. In a time when the promise of education to prepare students for the future becomes harder to fulfil, we will focus on how we establish practices of study, in and beyond education2. How do we show students places where to start?”

In education we ask students to act; to make decisions, explore subjects of interest and create art. How do we help them to work through the resistance that comes from acting in a world that is unstable and unpredictable? Teaching being-with-uncertainty3 is characterised by an openness to knowing the world through epistemological gaps. This means recognizing that we will not be able to act with certainty in this world, while still managing to not become paralysed by this insight. Furthermore, as teachers and students, we must learn not simply to act, but to act with intent, despite the lack of guarantees for a desired outcome.

The aim of the workshop is to practice a shift from goal oriented teaching, to focus on places where to start. Based in a generous sharing of skills and experience, we will experiment with how we enter the classroom, introduce subjects and methods, and spark the will to study (in students as well as in ourselves), validating specific art bound pedagogies as we go. The workshop is based on Lisa Nyberg’s experience of teaching courses on “To Study” with first year students at academies of visual and performing arts, as well as her PhD project Pedagogies of the Unknown – studying for a future, without guarantees (2022).

This presentation will reflect on how to include performative elements when presenting artistic research: How do we mirror the content of the research in how it is communicated? How do we communicate the experience of art?

Starting from cultural geographer Ben Anderson notion of the future as a surprise I would like to discuss how we relate to the future unknown in arts education. In a Scandinavian context still very much bound to utopian thinking, acknowledging how the future will surprise us offers a shift in how we relate to the unknown that does not aim to control. With an element of unpredictability, we can put our efforts into imagining both probable and improbable futures, paying attention to what is incubated within the present, and foster a state of readiness for what is to come. The future as a surprise allows us to practice staying and playing with uncertainty. With examples from my own teaching at different Scandinavian Art Academies I will offer a set of suggestions for places where to start.

Lisa Nyberg's PhD project starts from the question: how can we study for a future unknown? In light of anthropogenic climate change, a global environmental crisis, and its destabilizing impact on social and economic systems, there is an urgency to examine how we relate to the future in our pedagogy; how we anticipate, imagine and prepare through our teaching and our studies. At the basis of this research is a teaching practice; the classroom of aesthetic education at the intersection of study, creative work and the institution. From this base a performance practice has developed that draws from lecture performance and meditation as a quotidian and creative practice, to create a series of guided meditations. These are presented as art installations, as sound pieces and as activities in the classroom. The guided meditations propose an experiment in how to address the contradiction of learning for the future, by focusing, intently, on the present. Simultaneously, the project raises a critique of Western constructs of utopia as the dominant form of imagining otherwise, by looking to feminist and de-colonial theory that resist utopian fatalism and claims to universality. The aim is to make a critical shift from utopia towards a constantly changing and undetermined future – the unknown.

The symposium is initiated from an interest in working collectively, with the insight that this work also causes chafing. It is messy and complex to work in a group and it raises questions about power, openness and frameworks.How can one act, listen and be differently (with each other) in the world and perhaps thereby reshape it? How can one stay with the big perspectives with the help of the small: the body, the filth and chafing intact? The focus of the symposium is to practically investigate forms of thinking. We believe that all thoughts are thought from somewhere – in relation to a practice and to thoughts previously thought. We therefore see that how we think is crucial for what we think.We have invited six people who work with collective, listening and physical practices to engage in these questions, or ask new ones if necessary.Participants in the symposium are Juli Apponen, Jonna Bornemark, Eleanor Bauer, Sebastian Dahlqvist, Lisa Nyberg and Cara Tolmie, invited by Stina Nyberg and Sofia Wiberg.

This is an invitation to a practice, an induction, in the form of a text.