PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference based in The Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
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Current
Editors – Ram Krishna RanjanJyoti Mistry
This issue of PARSE Journal emerges from a curiosity to deepen an understanding of the affordances of fabulation across a range of artistic practices, tracing convergences and divergences, dilemmas and possibilities, approaches and methods. Its contributions were shaped in part by a two-day, in-person workshop held in Gothenburg in early 2024, brought together through an Open Call, with many of the participants eventually contributing to the pages that follow.
Rather than treating fabulation as a settled concept or singular method, the contributions approach it as a site of experimentation, exploration and contestation, as a mode of engaging with absence, opacity and silenced histories, while remaining attentive to the responsibilities such engagements entail. It is invested in teasing out the situated, ethical and methodological dilemmas that emerge when fabulation is practised, and attempts to think conscientiously about what fabulation makes possible, what it risks and what it demands of those who mobilise it in the pursuit of knowledge, memory and justice and, perhaps most crucially, in dwelling in other possibilities.
Edith Marie Pasquier / Tryggve Lundberg, Living Bird: Stig, Konrad, Bryan, Brian, Pelle, Jill, John, Daniel, Tom, Ivy, Tony, Paul, 2025, Kinetic Sculpture/Instrument Bronze Figures, Tuning Forks.
Previous
Editors – Tarsh BatesMichael LukaszukLisa NybergDaniel ShankenYoung Suk Lee
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.[1]
Ameena Aljerman Alali, Toub, Toub, 2023, still from video, 3 min. 42 sec
Forthcoming
Encounters in the Archive
- Issue 24
- — Autumn 2026
With this issue we aim to reconsider ways that artists and researchers have rethought, reimagined and reworked histories and experiences in their encounters with materials in archival repositories. The dialogic exchange between researchers and artists and, artists as researchers affords opportunities for experimentation across disciplines towards decolonial approaches and methods that make it necessary to highlight the iterative process of “re” – processes that invite a constant return to the archive. As Jacques Derrida has described the return to the archive is “compulsive and repetitive” as ways to “open to the future.”
Walking Backwards:
Fabulation, Political Memory, and Imagination in "Postwar"[1] Guatemala
Collective Making as Pre-Figurative Fabulations
An Archaeology of Absence:
Following Traces of the “Gold Fever” Throughout Brazil
Stitching Raby Diop’s Presence
A Narrative Woven and Dyed in Fabric
Traumatic Objects:
Interspecies Fabulatory Practice
Enargeia:
Performance Lecture: ‘I hold it to my ear. I hold it in my hand’[1]
The Fairy Tale’s Tail
Some Writing and Reading Scores for a Critical Actualisation of the Mythological Mélusine
