
Conference reports The politics of environmental knowledge. Shaping environments through research, art, and activism
The CBEES Environmental Conference, “The politics of environmental knowledge: Shaping environments through research, art, and activism in the Baltic Sea Region – and beyond” took place May 23–24, 2022 and was arranged in collaboration between CBEES and the Färgfabriken art gallery.
Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds BW 2022:3-4, pp 148-149
Published on balticworlds.com on January 18, 2023
The CBEES Environmental Conference, “The politics of environmental knowledge: Shaping environments through research, art, and activism in the Baltic Sea Region – and beyond” took place May 23–24, 2022 and was arranged in collaboration between CBEES and the Färgfabriken art gallery.
Day 1: “Challenging borders between knowledge, imagination and action” at Södertörn University.
Day 2: “Revealing radical realities: Art as knowledge for transformation” at the Färgfabriken art gallery.
The Baltic Sea region, like many other natural and cultural ecosystems, faces multiple socio-environmental challenges which require substantial societal transformations and adaptations. Such transformations are activated and negotiated in formal politics as well as in everyday lives and call upon different ways of knowing our natural and social environments. How do the politics of environmental knowledge shape the ways in which environments are created and governed? And how can critical research, art, and activism reimagine the interfaces of power and knowledge(s) to highlight marginalized perspectives and environmental problems?
Around thirty researchers, artists, and activists attended CBEES Environmental Conference, “The politics of environmental knowledge: Shaping environments through research, art, and activism in the Baltic Sea Region — and beyond”, in order to reflect on these questions, present their work, and think together about how our theoretical, methodological, creative, and political struggles can be understood and overcome.
The conference took place May 23—24, 2022, in south Stockholm. On the first day, artists and activists were invited to present their projects at Södertörn University, and discuss with an interdisciplinary panel “Challenging borders between knowledge, imagination and action”, featuring filmmaker Clara Bodén, visual artist Pavel Otdelnov, researcher and activist Leif Dahlberg, and researcher Johan Gärdebo, and moderated by Tatiana Sokolova and Viviane Griesinger. On the second day, the researchers had to venture out of their comfort zone to come to discuss their work at the Färgfabriken art gallery on Liljeholmen in the public event “Revealing radical realities: Art as knowledge for transformation”. The conference was followed by a public event in which the artists Vegan Flava, Pavel Otdelnov, Elise Alloin, and Sidonie Hadoux presented their art and discussed it with each other and with moderators Irina Seits (Södertörn University) and Daniel Urey (Färgfabriken).
While organizing this event, we learnt that the borders between art, research, and activism are as powerful as they are arbitrary. As organizers, we found ourselves reinforcing them by grouping and regrouping presentations and themes into the categories of “art”, “science” and “activism” — even though the conference aimed at challenging the borders between the different domains.
But more importantly, the conference made us realize the asymmetry that exists between the “scientific” and “non-scientific” worlds. Artists and activists told us on several occasions that they felt intimidated when presenting their work to academics. We found it surprising: Do they not “know” the topics of the discussions just as well or much better than the researchers? Moreover, there was a perception shared by people in all three groups that by inviting artists and activists to the university we were “upgrading” their contributions — by providing the possibility to present in an academic setting. This in itself describes the imbalance that is maintained between scientific and “non-scientific” knowledge, such as artistic, activist, experiential, tacit, and practical. However, the conference participants contested the separation between these spheres through their work: by an artist (Vegan Flava) inviting everyone to contemplate the graffiti of a dying bee whose species was unsuccessfully transferred by scientists across the Baltic Sea; by a feminist researcher and curator of contemporary art (Caroline Elgh) singing her presentation to an amazed audience; by another artist (Pavel Otdelnov) presenting a film based on comprehensive research into the “adventures” of garbage using tracking devices and geographic information systems with elements of investigative journalism and political activism. These intersections show that the different approaches do not exclude but rather complement each other: participatory action research is inspired by activism, artistic expression by ethnography and activism by artistic performance. Scholarly, artistic, and activist approaches are all needed to enrich our environmental knowledge.
The conference experience allowed us to identify two leverage points which might potentially allow for a meaningful engagement between academia, art, and activism. First, a sensitivity needs to be fostered for the power hierarchies between the fields, including the structure of funding which promotes the “invited spaces” where better positioned actors (usually academia) pull in “the rest of society” (such as artists) to collaborate on “academic” terms. Although it is very hard to work against such structures, there needs to be a commitment for that on behalf of the academic actors, such as seeking funding which promotes deep collaborative work. Second, it is about finding a mutually inclusive way of communicating to various publics. Again, from the academic perspective, it is all too easy to “hijack” the artists’ contributions into academic texts written in a language which might be alienating for the artists themselves. Here academia can learn from artists who very effectively carry out their own research or include scientific perspectives into their work in ways which deeply engage diverse audiences. Collaborations between artists and activists, or the combination of art and activism in one’s work, can also be a source of learning for researchers.
The conference’s center of attraction was the desire to share the multiple ways in which we work with and against the different forms of power, both enabling and constricting, which shape our environments. The participants employ different kinds of knowing: seeing, monitoring, calculating, listening, painting, filming from above, feeling their way through to the experiences of what it is to exist and act in constantly changing environments, constantly defying our attempts to know them.
There was a united sense of urgency resulting from the realization that as we are trying to get to know our environments, so we are changing and shaping them as much as they are shaping us. To see the diversity of the presented work and to try and find ways to work together and to make a collective sense of it all was both deeply challenging and satisfying. As organizers, we hope it was as rich in learning for the participants as it was for us. ≈