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Climate Forum I

The Climate Forum is a space of dialogue and exchange with respect to the concrete operational practices being implemented within the art field in response to climate change and ecological degradation. This is the first in a series of meetings hosted by HDK-Valand within L'Internationale's Museum of the Commons programme.

The series builds upon earlier research resulting in the (2022) book Climate: Our Right to Breathe and reaches toward emerging change practices. It asks: How might the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic be operationalised within everyday working? While the wider agenda of the series is to consider institutional practices, the first session maps some of the ways ecopolitics are formulated by artist and activist iniatives.

The Sveriges utsädesförening (Swedish Seed Association). Photography courtesy of Lantmännen, ca. 1907.

Morning: On Different Grounds

Åsa Sonjasdotter is PhD researcher at HDK-Valand. Sonjasdotter’s artistic research engages in material-narrative processes for the unmaking of violent relations enacted through food and land. As part of this work she has investigated the development of “pure line” plant breeding in South Scandinavia the 1890s, the basis for the control imposed on farmers globally by seed corporations.

Pujita Guha is a PhD candidate, University of California Santa Barbara. Her research addresses contemporary histories of upland forests in south and southeast Asia, and the shaping of indigenous political claims to forest land via artistic, scientific, and cartographic media. An artist and curator, she co-founded and co-directed the artistic and research platform, The Forest Curriculum, and is part of the curatorial team for Hosting Lands.

Huiying Ng works through research, art, and advocacy to develop an iterative practice of knowledge gathering and transmission. As a doctoral student of anthropology at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, she works with the project team Environing Infrastructures. Ng develops methodologies of participatory action research with Living Soil’s work in Singapore, and the Participatory Food Systems group in Southeast Asia and beyond.



Early afternoon: Plant Bodies as Archive

Nkule Mabaso is a PhD researcher at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. She is also director of Natal Collective an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of creative and cultural Africana contemporary art and politics.

Zayaan Khan studied Landscape Design and Horticulture, focusing on green roof systems and their practicality to increase biodiversity as well as food security within the so-called limited soils of the city. Khan’s career has its basis working in, and with, organisations working in land reform, agrarian transformation and food justice, understanding the socio-political contexts of present day crises and working towards unhinging our dependency on neoliberalism, with indigenous food reclamation as praxis.

Godelive Kasangati Kabena graduated in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kinshasa, and discovered photography in 2016 using her mobile phone as a camera. In 2017, she participated in a two-year photography training course initiated by EUNIC-RDC, The Goethe Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts. Kasangati’s staged/constructed photography focuses on black and white self-portraiture. She has also created short films.



Late afternoon: Art for Radical Ecologies

The Institute of Radical Imagination initiated Art for Radical Ecologies as a platform towards a manifesto on the role of art and art workers in the struggle for climate justice and new ecologies: “We want to experience, as participants in social movements, aesthetic-political concatenations that interpret creativity as a radical character of the social and not as a commodity. The participants also share the conviction that the fight for climate justice is, necessarily, a fight against and beyond extractive capitalism, even in its green version (actually an attempt to turn the crisis into new accumulation).”

Booking a free place

The event is online and participation is free, however, booking is required. Enquiries to contact Prof. Mick Wilson, HDK-Valand: mick.wilson [ at ] gu.se.

Stills from the film Cultivating Abundance by Åsa Sonjasdotter, made in dialogue with the plant breeder Hans Larsson and the Allkorn association, 2022.

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