Close Attention

Too Wide and With/in: Multivocality as a Route Beyond Dualistic Frameworks.

Workshop Description:

In today’s highly sorted culture, the allure of interactive spaces of exposure and mutual influence seems to be shrinking. This is not only the effect of longstanding positivistic-colonial-capitalist frameworks of separation, sameness, and predictability, but a derivative of the rising phenomena Brené Brown describes as “ideological bunkers.” That today’s culture is organizing itself around polarization—distancing ourselves from those who disagree with us, or bonding with others solely through what Brown calls “common enemy intimacy.”

Together in sameness; together in hatred. Us versus them. Why, then, is multivocality still a claim worth pursuing in a culture whose dominant powers are set against it?

Too Wide and With/in designs opportunities to step outside that pattern and explore multivocality—the practice of making space for many voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing. Multivocality is set against the simplistic —and often self-referential— contributions of a binary reading. It is part of a complex metabolic system that favours noticing, integration, resonance, and diluted identity.

The workshop invites participants to directed role play exercises and collective discussion. Selections of texts will be read in-session to help sustaining the debate on the significance of multivocality as a reparative deep-listening strategy in a culture that does not seem to listen.

 

Participants are asked to prepare written reflections (around 150 words) in advance, responding to the following questions:

  • How (not) to talk to tyrants?
  • My fascistic sibling does not listen. But can I — can I listen through what their deafness is built upon?  

 No other preparation required.

 

List of reading material (available at the venue):

The Weak — Brandon LaBelle.

The Work (worksheet) — Byron Katie.

The Unpayable Debt (sel.) — Denise Ferreira da Silva.

The flexibility of Ideas (sel.); Exercise of Flexibility — Gregory Bateson.

Illuminist Radicalism (sel.); Illustrated Illiteracy — Marina Garcés.

The Tyrant — Michel Serres.

 

Wednesday 19 November 13:00-16:00

All welcome but registration required. To confirm a place please email rose.brander@gu.se

Chaotic Degrowth via Artistic Practices

Let your hand sink into the soil, Alexandra Papademetriou 2025 © Laura Selby

*This event is now fully booked*

Doors 18:00 | Readings begin 18:30

Join us for an evening exploring urgent creative methodologies in the climate crisis through the lens of degrowth with Sean Roy Parker and Alexandra Papademetriou. 

Emerging from multiple streams of ecological and social thought, degrowth signifies a critique of the narrative of perpetual economic growth, and of the centering of growth as a social objective.* Moreover, degrowth exposes a fundamental contradiction in the dominant capitalist mode: Infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. In a world addicted to production and prosperity, how can artists bring new strategies that centre well-being, care and collectivity into existence while being brutalised by the system they are wilfully failing? How do we reconceptualise artistic labour, production, and success in a degrowth context?

The evening begins with Sean Roy Parker reading excerpts from his debut poetry collection stewarding (2024, Monitor Books), followed by a critical discussion led by Papademetriou examining how enacting practical degrowth principles can reshape our understandings of artistic practice, as detailed in her ongoing project, The Degrowth Toolbox for Artistic Practices, 2021-.*Paraphrased from Degrowth, A Vocabulary for a New Era, Routledge, 2015 by Giacomo D’Alisa, Federico Demaria, Giorgos Kallis. More info at degrowthtoolbox.net 

Copies of stewarding (Parker) and Like Roots Splitting Stone (Papademetriou) will be available to purchase.

Due to interest in the event, and the limited capacity of Pony Books we have made a registration list to guarantee a seat. Please email rose.brander@gu.se to add your name to the list. 

Stewardship and Structures: Enacting, Regenerating and Maintaining

(I) Sean Roy Parker, page from “stewarding”, Monitor Books 2024, (II) Eva Rowson, ventilation hole in concrete wall, Bergen Kjøtt, Norway, 2023 (background) Nathan Clydesdale, LjurhallaFabriken surrounds, 2025.

This event explores the intimate politics of care through the methodology of world building—physical structures that (are yet to) exist and maintain, material lifecycle systems, and communal distribution of responsibility. Drawing from three artists’ shared politic that we are held in webs of interdependence with our localities, environments and communities, together we will investigate how artistic practices can embody disruption, embrace slowness, practice thrift, and foster deep connection. 

Through two distinct yet synergetic presentations, we examine how critical frameworks—concrete, chaotic and conceptual—can transform perceived barriers into foundations for reshaping our relationship with the world during a polycrisis.


-Sean Roy Parker Intuitive Sensing 

“delayed                                           digestion a shift of state

dissolve my borders / surrender to deep minerality” 

– from Hospitality in “stewarding”, published by Monitor Books, 2024

A session exploring practical ways to critically engage with our innate role as Consumer. We will work towards accepting temporality and embracing chaos as a path to belonging with the world. Through forest bathing, experimental writing, attention to plant life, and radical amateurism, Parker guides participants to finding home within their own bodies while suggesting how a ‘degrowth’ future requires drastic decay of norms.

This presentation focuses on the practices of careful observation, conscious slowing, and mindful digestion of experience as forms of environmental and personal stewardship. It invites participants to consider how artistic practice can become a form of at-tending—to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.


-Eva Rowson Adventures in Concrete: Maintenance, care and courage in changing concretised structures

“The brickwall is what you come against when you are involved in the practical project of opening worlds to bodies that have historically been excluded from those worlds. An organisation can be a world; a neighbourhood; a street; a home; a nation” –Sara Ahmed

Presented as a radio show mixing music, reflection, and etymological exploration, Eva Rowson excavates the polysemic* nature of “concrete”—simultaneously a building material, something definite, and the act of solidifying. Through this format, she examines how we might demolish concretised walls in society while sustaining new, accessible structures that lift the concrete ceiling for collective liberation.

Concretised structures possess deep foundations that sustain them as “just the way things are.” Yet the opposite of concrete need not be structureless—radical structure can provide vital support and empowerment, particularly for those historically excluded from concrete partitions. This presentation brings together diverse voices cracking concrete and building transformational, sustainable change from its ruins.

* A polysemic word is a word that has multiple meanings. In the case of concrete: a building material; a description meaning something definite; and to form or solidify something.


Semi-foraged rocket stove cooked vegan lunch by Andreas Engman.


LjurhallaFabriken is a non-profit organisation and resource centre for art and design, based within a 1930s factory and surrounding forest in rural Vårgårda. 

Led by artist Rachel Barron and child culture designer Nathan Clydesdale, LjurhallaFabriken is a meeting place for community building, resource sharing, collaboration and exchange.


Practical info:

LjurhallaFabriken is situated at Ornunga 8, 44793 Vårgårda.

All welcome! A free bus is arranged to depart from outside Akademin Valand, Vasagatan 50 at 10:00 on September 24 in order to arrive at Ljurhallafabriken for 11:00, returning to Gothenburg for 18:00.

Vegan lunch will be provided.

The event is free- but to secure a place registration is required (we have limited spaces on the bus and need to know how many are coming for the food planning and prep).

The event will be in English.

Any questions contact: rose.brander@gu.se

Close Attention Study Circle

To notice is a full-bodied project of being in a specific material, physical, bodily, affective, geopolitical, cultural, historical and socio-environmental spacetime. To notice is to put one’s imaginaries to check and trace their effects in co-forming a milieu: imaginaries are never abstractions but consequential political matterings. (Neimanis, 2017)

My proposal here is an ethics with neither origin nor conclusion, ethics which are continually produced in the present, in being present. Ethics here are not simply about relationships: distant, objective and cool. They are born of relationships, of relating: directly, intersubjectively and warmly. An intimate process which never ends. (Heckert, 2010)

Unless all of us are free none of us are free. Fundamentally re-inscribing what liberty is outside of individual liberties. It’s about the capacity to notice how things are and as such imagine how they could be not as they are. (Leung, 2023)

Knowing another is endless… The thing to be known grows with the knowing. (Shepherd, 1977)

 

PARSE introduces Close Attention, a monthly study circle exploring site-sensitive artistic practices through four interconnected thematic topics: Multi-voices, Maintenance, Listening, and Slowness. Together, we’ll develop a theoretical framework that examines the methods, poetics, and ethics of artistic approaches rooted in deep, attentive engagement with place and context.

Proposed texts include:

Silent Whale Letters: A Long-Distance Correspondence, on all Frequencies (Ella Finer, Vibeke Mascini, 2023)

Beneath the Surface: Deep Listening, Buried Narratives and Embodied Resistance (Luïza Luz, 2024)

– stewarding (Sean Roy Parker, 2024)

Dub: Finding Ceremony (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2020)

The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd, 1977)

 

Location: Pony Books, Gothenburg (unless otherwise noted)

Language: English

Registration: It is ideal that participants commit to the full schedule. Attendance is limited. Please send a brief email identifying which of the 4 topics is most relevant to your practice by March 17 2025 to rose.brander@gu.se

Schedule 2025 (each session will be connected to a topic with more details, including reading to follow registration).

  1. March 26 13.00-16.00: Session 1 Pony Books 
  2. April 23 13.00-16.00: Session 2 Pony Books
  3. May 21 13.00-16.00: Session 3 Pony Books
  4. June 18  Session 4 LjurhallaFabriken
  5. August 27 13.00-16.00: Session 5 Pony Books
  6. September 24 Session 6 LjurhallaFabriken 
  7. October 22 13.00-16.00: Session 7 Pony Books
  8. November 19 13.00-16.00: Session 8 Pony Books

The study circle is facilitated by Rose Brander.