Moulding Nature – Discursive Struggles Over the Environment
Group exhibition
Project rooms, Färgfabriken
Curators: Nico Carpentier, Daniel Urey and Emilia Rosenqvist
Designer: Irene Straccuzzi
Participating artists: Katrīna Neiburga, Hanna Ljungh, Maja Smrekar, Soraya Poulin, Paula von Seth, Tessa Joosse
Other participants: Inger-Helene Gråik, Christina Åhren, Annica Kvint, Anders Kling, Karin Kjellson, Torun Hammar, Samuel Michaelsson, Alexandra Björnström, Anton Ståhl, David Garcia, Elin Markstedt, Emil Tjännström, Fredrik Tåg, Joakim Karlsson, Mattis Skogsskir, Niklas Fjellborg, Niklas Viklund, Pernilla Renfors, Theres Karlsson, Ulrica Rahula, Ali Minanto, Lena Ylipää, Viktoria Birgersson, Katarina Brunnström, Gabrielle, Fredrik Emilson, Manuel Vason, Borut Peterlin, Hana Jošić, Anže Sekelj, Borut Peterlin, Ada, Baxus and Afra
Moulding Nature raises questions about how we perceive our environment. In video works, collages, photos and installations, artists and other participants explore how different discourses* affect the way we give meaning to nature and the role of mankind in it. Discourses that often are in conflict with each other and compete for space, sometimes even fight each other.
The exhibition is part of a project on environmental communication where researchers have identified voices, positions and ideologies that can be linked to the discussion about nature and the environment. These are illustrated through an ideological map developed by Nico Carpentier (with a design by Irene Straccuzzi), which, together with selected works of art, gives a multifaceted and deepened picture of the struggle about how the world around us can be interpreted.
A large part of the visual material in the exhibition has been produced through co-creative activities, where people from different geographical and social contexts participated. The result is a number of installations that highlight the many layers of interpretations, voices and conflicts of interest that characterize landscapes, forestry, gardens and urban environments.
*Discourse can be described as “a filter” that affects how the conversation is conducted and how different phenomena are perceived within an area. From a social sciences perspective our relationship to reality is maintained or controlled through various discourses. For example, if you believe in God and part of a religious discourse, you perceive the world in a different way than someone who is an atheist and part of an atheistic discourse.
About the art works
Maja Smrekar (with Manuel Vason, Borut Peterlin, Hana Jošić and Anže Sekelj, Borut Peterlin, Ada, Baxus and Afra)
K-9_topology: Hybrid Family, Ecce canis & Autoportrait // !brute_force (photo)
The series of photographs visualize the symbiotic potential of human-nature relationships, and the intimate connection between human animals and non-human animals. As a set of representations of natureculture, Smrekar’s work shows the entangled interdependence of nature and culture where humans can only be humans through the interaction with nature, transferring nature from a position of constitutive outside to a constitutive inside. The series also communicates an egalitarian ethos, where, for instance, strength is not an exclusivity, but shared throughout all realms of our world.
Maja Smrekar (b. 1978) is educated in sculpture and video at The Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. As an artist she has been using her voice to speak on ecofeminism, inter-species relationships, posthumanism, technology and ideological structures in society. Her artistic work is inspired by ecology, ethology, AI, robotics, biotechnology, reproductive medicine, molecular biology etc
Artist´s webpage
Hanna Ljungh
Vedergällning (Retaliation) (video 04.46 min)
The video is a tribute to a scene from Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, activating the latter film’s narrative of the tension between paganism and Christianity. In Bergman’s film, the destruction of the birch tree ends with the extraction of twigs, which are then used in a purification ritual right before the revenge killing of the three herdsmen, by Töre, the father of the women they raped. Here, the tree serves as a dramatic symbol for the vulnerability and destruction of youth, but also for the human relentlessness in instrumentalizing and utilizing anything, including nature. These are meanings that Ljungh’s video cannot escape, even though the actual usage of the birch twigs has been removed from her video. Still, at the same time, the focus on human destructiveness is combined with a demonstration of nature’s resilience, as it takes the human actor in both films considerable effort to eventually destroy the birch tree.
Hanna Ljungh (b. 1974) has an education from Parsons School of Design, New York and Konstfack, Stockholm. She is based in Stockholm, where she works with film, photography, sculpture and installation. Her work reflects upon and questions the fine line between what we call human and non-human forms of existence and the complex relations between them.
Artist´s webpage
Katrīna Neiburga
Pickled Long Cucumbers (video 11.07 min)
The video locates humans, in different capacities, in the forest. The opening birth-like scene, where the soil produces, or releases, a male and female, suggests a strong emphasis on synergism and rootedness, but the video simultaneously undermines the simplicity of a return-to-nature, showing the entanglement of nature and culture (or natureculture), which also implies the impossibility of shaking off culture and civilisation. Using an anti-romantic perspective, the video shows the characters searching, with a combination of bewilderment and perseverance, for an unreachable balance, where both nature and culture produce obstacles that disrupt what appears to be a simple life of a family in the woods.
Katrīna Neiburga (b. 1978) is educated at Art Academy of Latvia and lives and works in Riga. She has received many awards, including the prestigious Purvitis Award, and has represented Latvia at the Venice Biennale. Neiburga’s main medium is video and she uses the camera with a socio-anthropological interest in everyday day life zooming in and revealing unnoticed or ignored phenomena.
Artist´s webpage
Soraya Poulin (photography by Ali Minanto)
Urban bird (collage)
The art work is a reflection on the positionality of pigeons in urban landscapes, which brings in several elements. On the one hand, the work refers to the struggle between birds and humans, where pigeons are constructed as problematic – a pest that needs to be eradicated. Here we find a critique on anthropocentrism and its hierarchization, that disconnects nature from culture (creating a dualist structure), and positions humans and their cities as privileged and superior. But the art work also emphasises the co-habitation aspect, driven through the pigeons’ agency, who are not that easily discarded. This brings in a more entanglementist, synergetic and egalitarian perspective, where pigeons are seen as also entitled to the urban spaces, symbolised through the parodic re-enactment of a pigeon exhibition, playing with the limits of anthropomorphic representations.
Soraya Poulin (b. 1996) is an artist, graphic designer and illustrator based in Sion, Switzerland.
Artist´s webpage
Paula von Seth
The Forest Owners – Balancing Acts for Women Family Forestry (installation)
Participants forest owners: Viktoria Birgersson, Katarina Brunnström, Lena Ylipää and Gabrielle
Participant artist: Lena Ylipää
Thanks to: Mia Vendel, Fredrik Emilson, Ann Frössén and Viktor Nilsson
The installation combines four photographs and texts, co-produced with female forest owners, integrated into different types of tree artifacts. These different representations of the forest elucidate the tension between utilization, responsibility and care, and the complexities of production and protection in environments where capitalist interests are prevailing. It is a demonstration of the multi-layered nature of human relations with the forest that the conservation of nature entails. Structured by material ownership, and ethics of care, deep affective and aesthetic relations, in search of the balance between utilization and non-intervention, between taking and giving.
Paula von Seth (b. 1971) is an artist, art educator and university teacher. She has several educations, including from the University of Fine Arts in Umeå, Konstfack and Lund University as well as SLU, where she studied agronomy with a focus on rural development. Von Seth has solid experience from art education work and studied creative work with sustainability issues in focus. Her contribution to Molding Nature is part of an ongoing research project at SLU.
Tessa Joosse
Ugly selfie (video 03.02 min)
Both a parody and a call to action, the video analyses online media representations of nature, critiquing the consumerist and instrumentalist perspectives that nature selfies communicate. In particular, the video is an argument against geo-reductionism, or the reduction of the multitude of spaces to a limited number of options, thus hiding the diversity and complexity of nature by casting it in the role of beautified background. The video simultaneously calls upon selfie producers to visualize the damage done to nature by humans, and to stop denying the urgency of treating the planet in a more just and respectful manner. The video argues that the production of these “ugly selfies” will diversify the representations of nature, and thus support a more geo-pluralist approach to nature.
Tessa Joosse (b. 1974) is a filmmaker and artist who lives and works in Amsterdam. After her studies in sculpture and installation art she has made many art-installations and theater backdrops for different companies and venues amongst others for the Operadagen Rotterdam and November music. In 2010 she won the prize for best short film at the international festival for environmental film in Paris, France. Her work has since been shown in many festivals and museums.
Artist´s webpage
Silencing and Unsilencing the Garden (installation)
Alexandra Björnström, Anton Ståhl, David Garcia, Elin Markstedt, Emil Tjännström, Fredrik Tåg, Isabella (no surname added), Joakim Karlsson, Mattis Skogsskir, Niklas Fjellborg, Niklas Viklund, Pernilla Renfors, Theres Karlsson, and Ulrica Rahula
In cooperation with Skellefteå Konsthall and Urkraft Skellefteå.
This participatory art project is centred around the concept of silencing/unsilencing nature, where – through the method of photovoice – different perspectives on the garden were produced, critiquing the silencing of nature through anthropocentric interventions and simultaneously strengthening (or unsilencing) nature, through the development of empathic stakeholdership that also allows for the acknowledgement of synergetic human-nature relations, but also nature’s agency, and in particular its capacity to resist human oppressive and destructive practices. This acknowledgement produces a posthumanist perspective, which is grounded in a fundamental egalitarian vision.
Silencing and Un-Silencing the Landscape (installation)
Inger-Helene Gråik and Christina Åhren
In cooperation with Gaaltije – Saemien museum
The installation integrates a series of contradictory layers that all provide meaning to a particular space, combining a multitude of different significatory repertoires. This articulation also symbolizes the impossibility to give a full closure of meaning to this space. It remains impossible to fully capture, fully comprehend and fully control. The intersection of indigenous and Swedish voices and representations turns this into a post-colonial installation, where the different layers all have to co-exist, and the colonial past, with its oppressive power imbalances, now co-exists with the contemporary era, without the past having disappeared, but also without the past still being the past.
Renderad framtid (Rendered future) (installation)
Annica Kvint (journalist), Anders Kling (architect), Karin Kjellson (architect), Torun Hammar (architect) and Samuel Michaelsson (architect)
The participatory project reflects on the architectural practice of rendered images which intend to make the not-yet-visible visible. These images are highly ideological, showing future human interventions in urban landscapes, creating idealised worlds that not only privilege the city but also romanticize the urban. Through the combination of rendered images and their parodies, the installation takes a firm geo-pluralist stance and offers a critique on cityism and anthropocentric dualism. At the same time, the art work demonstrates the limits of representation itself, by pointing its ideological, contingent and unstable nature.
Further reading
Discursive Struggles Over The Environment
An introduction by Nico Carpentier, Extraordinary Professor at Charles University, Prague
The way we give meaning to the environment often seems obvious, straightforward and unproblematic. Nature, for instance, seems to be apparent to us, offering itself freely to our unbiased observations, with a purity which produces considerable pleasure for us, humans. Through this empiricist enjoyment, we conveniently forget that humans collectively produce these meanings, and that these meanings are not pre-given by our environment. While we are aesthetically enthralled by—for example—a landscape, we lose sight of the socially constructed nature of the criteria that produce these aesthetic experiences in the first place. This also implies that our environment is not completely outside us, humans. On the contrary, we permanently, but often unconsciously, invoke human-produced discourses to make sense of the environments, without which these environments cannot have meaning for us. This entanglement of discourses and materialities connects us to the world outside us, but also allows us to exercise control over that very same world.
These meanings are still always particular. Or, in other words, there are always other meanings possible. In still different words: Representation is never perfect, because meanings always escape us, like sand that slips through our fingers. We see how the way we give meaning to phenomena, to processes, to objects, and to ourselves, changes over time, with ideas—or what Foucault called épistémès—being structurally different in different centuries. Also space generates difference, with different societies, in different parts of the world, having structurally different ideas about that world. But this argument of time-space specificity is still too easy, as it might lead us to believe that in a particular time and place, there is still stability and homogeneity. Instead, there is radical difference, also within one time and place, through the multitude of the social, with its many genders, classes, ethnicities, ages, and other social positions, with its many histories, politics, institutional affiliations, professions, and other structures, and with its many psychologies and bodily differences. That radical difference renders homogeneity impossible, however much we desire for sameness, and however intensely we fantasize about it.
These radical differences within the social are translated into the discursive realm, as there are structural differences in how we see, experience, understand and communicate about the world. Our diversity feeds into the construction of a diversity of discourses that give meaning to the same phenomena, processes, objects or subjects. This is where meaning becomes political, as these different interpretative frameworks engage in competition with each other, in an attempt to have their perspectives and truth claims accepted, and to have other (completing) discourses delegitimated, discredited and sometimes even destroyed. In the latter case, when discourses manage to achieve strong dominance (or hegemony), they manage to push other ways of thinking into oblivion, and to become taken-for-granted and normalized, and thus invisible. But even then, counter-hegemonic discourses, slumbering in the shadows of society might eventually gain strength again and they might even, at some point in time, dethrone these once-dominant discourses. This produces hope, with the aspiration that destructive ways of thinking might, one day, be abandoned and replaced by more benevolent discourses; but there is also the grim warning that the humanity and civility that we now possess, might be lost one day.
The number of discourses (or ideologies) that give meaning to the environment, to nature, to human-nature relations is surprisingly high, especially when we also take into consideration the counter-hegemonic discourses, that engage in discursive struggles with our more dominant ways of thinking. All these many different discourses have a certain degree of autonomy and a specificity, but at the same time, they are articulated with other, similar discourses. With these discourses, they form discursive assemblages. The components of these discursive assemblages strengthen and support each other, with one filling the gaps that another discourse leaves open, with one adding another layer of meanings to the ones of those affiliated discourses, and with one acting as connectors to yet other parts of our discursive realities. One of the outcomes of the MEC@ICSJ research project behind the ”Discursive struggles over the environment” exhibition was a map of the multitude of environment-related discourses, identifying two main discursive assemblages, one hegemonic one, built around the discourse of anthropocentrism, and one counter-hegemonic one, with ecocentrism at its heart.
What we call the ideological map of the environment gives an impressive—albeit necessarily incomplete—overview of the many discourses that structure our ways of thinking about the environment, nature and ourselves. The ideological map of the environment also structures the entire exhibition, with its artistic interventions inspired by the academic reflections behind the map’s construction, without this academic knowledge ever imposing itself. These dialogues were deeply respectful towards the autonomy of both the fields of academia and arts, searching for points of contact which had the potential to enrich both fields, avoiding hierarchies and imperialist tendencies, and instead cherishing equalities and synergies.
In order to further strengthen the dialogical nature of this project, and to ensure the presence of a multiplicity of voices, also from outside academia and the arts, a series of participatory arts projects were organised in the year running up to the exhibition, producing a series of art works, that consisted of collaborations between artists and non-artists. Our participatory approach, grounded in a critical power analysis, ensured the activation of creative processes that empowered all those involved, without privileging artists over non-artists (or vice versa), and with careful attempts to also bring in non-human voices. This diversity of authors, with all the complexities it generated, symbolizes the multiplicity of voices that engage in the discursive struggles over the environment, the many different discursive positions that human animals can take, the need to bring in the voices of non-human actors, and the need for a post-humanist ethics of care, allowing the human and the non-human to take respected and comfortable positions within their world.
Related
The exhibition is part of the research program Mistra Environmental Communication, and more specific the program for research concerning media and arts, lead by Nico Carpentier, Extraordinary professor at Culture and Communication Research Center, Charles University in Prague.
Färgfabriken has initiated several co-creative activities within the program based on different themes; garden, how nature is “silenced” and rendered pictures as desinformation about the future. These activities took place at different locations in the country in collaboration with Skellefteå konsthall, Virserums konsthall, Gaaltje Saemien Museume in Östersund, Färgfabriken’s Youth Council and a group of architects. The exhibition Moulding Nature is created from results of the research and material from the co-creative activities together with selected artworks.
Top picture: Moulding Nature design by Irene Stracuzzi. Still image from the filmed performance Vedergällning, Hanna Ljungh, 2007, 04:32 min. Courtesy of Filmform.
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