Krabstadt is a fictitious town in the Arctic where all the Nordic countries send their unwanted people and problems. It is an animated transmedia project developed by Ewa Einhorn and Jeuno JE Kim, shaped through many collaborations and contexts. As a location where visions are tested, Krabstadt attracts individuals from different demographics, such as feminists, artists, retired teachers, emotionally stuck creatures, the long-term unemployed, and architects.

Krabstadt has now animated its Education Center (KEC) which traverses between being a drawn element in an animated fictional universe and an actual context hosting educational time. KEC seeks to exchange ideas on teaching methods and attitudes, learning outcomes and activities that are informed by performance, translation, digital and non-digital games.

PARSE journal issue 18 (2024) explores the thinking that occurs when bodies are in motion. Contributors from the fields of aesthetics, sports history, psychology, literature, performance and craft consider the ways our solitary bodies in motion think differently to our social and sedentary selves. Eclectic, rather than esoteric, content aims to draw attention to the various ways movement can influence, and at times unlock, fixed patterns of thinking.

Departing from the interests of cognitive science to explain why thinking in motion takes place, contributors instead offer examples of what thinking in motion entails and how it may influence artistic practice. Examples of motion include the more familiar experiences of walking and running – but also swimming, cycling, rock climbing and motorcycle riding. The experimental spirit of the issue is reflected in contributors’ use of hybrid genres of writing and methods of research. The academic voice sits beside storytelling and memoir, history is re-walked and re-written, orality heard and the first person vivid.

Thinking in Motion offers insights relevant to the interconnected realms of creativity, concentration, stamina, the subconscious, mental health and the individual. The solitary is emphasized in an effort to recover respect for the crucial benefits of thinking alone, a vital and effective component of many creative practices frequently decommissioned from the activities currently deemed worthy academic research. Shared by contributors is a recognition, and trust, in the reality of embodied knowledge because, to borrow from the eloquence of Rebecca Solnit, “the motions of the mind cannot be traced, but those of the feet can.” (Wanderlust pp. 6)

Journal issue 18 contributors: Lisa Garber, Jools Gilson, Jessica Hemmings, Robert Muponde, Martin Polley and Bálint Veres.

Exhibition may be framed through many different figures: the exhibition as visibility machine; the exhibition as public sphere; the exhibition as medium; the exhibition as staging site; the exhibition as institutional utterance; the exhibition as spatial choreography; the exhibition as apparatus or dispositif; the exhibition as a rhetorical operation addressing people and/or modelling the world; the exhibition as theatre of power: and the exhibition as assemblage or social operator. This research explores the question of exhibition with particular focus on the exhibition as an object of study; as a site, agent and mode of enquiry in its own right; and as a space of the political imaginary.

In the last five years, the politics of citation, rooted in critical race thought, has generated cross-disciplinary scholarly debate. Notably, it has found itself mobilised more recently in relation to global calls for the decolonisation of the curriculum. While institutions and individuals have at times promoted tokestic empty gestures, numerous scholars and visual practitioners have been engaging with this field of knowledge in care-driven, innovative and resistant ways.

We construct citational practices as transdisciplinary, expansive, emancipatory, subversive, generative, emotional, political, spatial, sensory, performative, utopic, conflictual, dialogic, ecological, technological (to name some!). In this issue we wish to centre visual practices (in the expanded sense of the term) which dynamically challenge institutional and historical logics of what citation can and perhaps should be. Further, we wish to interrogate and nuance the right vs. wrong ethic which governs the binary of citing vs. plagiarizing, and unpack the motivations, intentions and implications which dictate who we cite, how we cite, why we cite them as well as those who are consistently left out of dominant disciplinary processual frameworks. How do artistic, curatorial, architectural, spatial, cinematic, sonic, techno, gastro (and more!) practices help shape new directions for our conversations on citation?

Powers of Love: Enchantment to Disaffection, fifth PARSE biennial research conference.

The fifth PARSE biennial research conference from 15–17 November, 2023 at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden will explore the scope of love in its meanings and manifestations. From its occidental institutionalisation to its transformative potential as expressed in wider cultural contexts, the conference will engage with modes of art making, literary practices and scholarship with a focus on love as enchantment, as an entangled power in politics, as friendship, as eros, as intimacy, as queer potentiality and as disaffection. The powers of love have transformative affective registers in labour, learning collectives, economies of humanitariansim, ecosophy and ecosexuality yet within the powers of love also persists the sediments of historical, contextual, institutional and discursive formations. Love is arguably indispensable for human and planetary survival, and yet universalizing narratives of the intersubjective, immanence, communal harmony, and mastery of the earth may be seen to propose an all-encompassing narcissism.

The Intersectional Engagements in Politics and Art research trajectory within PARSE undertakes a critical exploration of the nexus of gender, race, sexuality and coloniality in contemporary artmaking, scholarship, and artistic research. Focusing on socially engaged practices related to memory, history, embodiment, and alterity, we seek to involve and publish scholars and artists from a wide range of fields, disciplines, and contexts. 

In 2018-19 a series of PARSE Dialogues, curated by Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, took place at various locations in Gothenburg, staging interdisciplinary encounters between researchers and artists from a wide range of fields. Invited scholars and artists included Hülya Arık, Peter Burton, Işıl Eğrikavuk, Joost Fontein, Ylva Habel, Saidiya V. Hartman, Elisabeth Hjorth, Christiane Jatahy, Hagar Kotef, Patricia Lorenzoni, Staffan Mossenmark, M. NourbeSe Philip, Koleka Putuma, Björn Säfsten, Astrid von Rosen, and Du Yun. The Dialogues involved collaborations with the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg; the Embassy of Sweden in South Africa; the Gender Studies Program at the University of Gothenburg; Gothenburg Art Sounds; Gothenburg Dance and Theatre Festival; Gothenburg International Book Fair; the Research School at the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg; and Scener och Samtal.

Additionally, PARSE and Intersectional Engagements collaborated on three dialogue events at the Market Theatre Lab in Johannesburg, together with the Embassy of Sweden in South Africa, and the Market Theatre Foundation.

This research arc inquires into the embodied, affective, performative, material, visual, and spatial politics of cross-border human mobilities, through arts/design as well as other disciplines and practices. It concerns all the actors involved in these mobilities: the remarkable proliferation over recent years of heterogeneous human migration formations, including labour migrants and people seeking asylum, the border enforcement infrastructures that arise in response to these mobilities, as well as how these infrastructures incorporate market-based/migration industry actors.

It will interrogate these complex alliances, antagonisms, and complicities, analysing or interpreting conditions where (nation-)states’ official infrastructures for border control coexist with migration industry infrastructures for border-crossing and market-based enterprises for border enforcement. These include border control through proliferating physical barricades, militarised policing, multilateral border cooperation, detention camps, deportation dragnets, and new strategies of surveillance; both formal and informal migration industry infrastructures (e.g. the outsourcing of migration visa processing, labour migrant recruitment agencies, remittance services, the rise of transit spaces along migration corridors, forged passport markets, migrant smuggling, amongst others); and private security contractors for offshore detention centres.

Among many other conceivable avenues of inquiry, we will engage with such questions as:

– How are lived experiences of these complex entanglements understood by differently positioned people as expressed in arts/design, activism, migration studies and other disciplines?

– How do people counteract, subvert, circumvent, resist, take charge of the everyday practices of these entangled bordering infrastructures?

– How can artists, academics, activist networks, and other civil society groups work together to challenge new forms of bordering in ways that are socially and intellectually relevant?

For some violence is a human universal that has shaped every aspect of history, delimiting social and political structures and even determining planetary fate. Contrastingly for others, violence is constitutive of the universalizing discourse of the subject within colonial-modernity. For some violence exposes historical injustices and asymmetries of socio-political structures manifesting the utterance and resistance of the oppressed. Others construe violence as the essential logic of all relations and the foundation of the social. While violence may be said to pervade the immediate lived experiences of all, it surely does so in ways that are differentiated in valency, intensity and outcome.

Representation of violence is ubiquitous. Representation itself is often understood as a primary matrix of violence. Digital networks relay violent events and encounters instantaneously; artistic practices often seek to disclose the psycho-social experience of violence. These forms may be seen to extend or redistribute the force and logic of violence.  Some speak of the ethical demand to bear witness, others of the imperative to disclose violence without thereby reproducing it. Yet others point to the language of violence, its semiotic field and modes of enunciation. Some propose a limit to representation in genocidal violence while others believe that we properly touch violence through materiality and the non-discursive. Divergent figurations of violence – as utterance from elided histories and subaltern lived experiences; as limit or logic of representation; as materiality and technique – shape different enquiries.

Art has been integral to recent debates and critical strategies contesting the social imaginary of work. The modernist vision of artistic labour as the paradigm of nonalienated labour has been replaced by the alignment of art with the micropolitics of work and the withdrawal from work. Artists have been regarded as exemplars of both new forms of 24/7 labour and the humane workplace.

This research arc explores the intersection of art and work not only by applying theories of work to art but also testing theories of work through art.

The Conviviality and Contamination project is a partnership with PARSE Journal, towards a special issue due for publication in Spring 2023.

Conviviality and Contamination aims to explore the concept of conviviality (Gilroy, 2004), through the literary tradition of contamination (Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2006).

Drawing from a series of collaborative workshops in September and October 2022 in Malmö and Berlin respectively, participants will develop various forms of creative, academic and literary practices. The workshops provide the participants with an opportunity to engage in forms of transversal writing and literary contamination and relies on a connection to South Africa.  Through experimental, interdisciplinary and international collaboration the geo-political and socio-cultural connection to South Africa may (or not) surface in the resulting work but the intention is to advance diverse and multi-layered work that explores key themes not only through content but through process and form.

The project emerges from a number of previous successful collaborations and networks, including the edited volume Conviviality at the Crossroads (2020) and the collaborative research group on Precarity and Conviviality (2019), part of the South Africa Sweden University Forum (SASUF).

The Conviviality and Contamination project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and led by Oscar Hemer, Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University.

https://mau.se/en/research/projects/conviviality-and-contamination/