PARSE - Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

Hem
Sverige
Gothenburg
PARSE - Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference.

PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference based in the Artistic Faculty at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Its purpose is to bring interdisciplinary art practices and researchers from across disciplines into dialogue through shared enquiry.

24/12/2025

Chaotic Degrowth via Artistic Practices
Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker

Audio documentation of an evening exploring urgent creative methodologies in the climate crisis through the lens of degrowth with Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker. Now available to listen and download.

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 began 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-. More info at degrowthtoolbox.net

https://parsejournal.com/article/chaotic-degrowth-via-artistic-practices/
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image: Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker in conversation, Pony Books, Gothenburg 26 September 2025.

22/12/2025

radio show now available to listen and download.

Recorded live on-site at LjurhallaFabriken for the Stewardship and Structures: Enacting, Regenerating and Maintaining seminar, 24 Sept 2025.

Adventures in Concrete
Eva Rowson

"The brick wall 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 by concrete partitions. This presentation brings together diverse voices cracking concrete and building transformational, sustainable change from its ruins.

https://parsejournal.com/article/adventures-in-concrete/

image: LjurhallaFabriken, 2025, Rachel Barron

fabriken

19/12/2025

This December, we invite you to enjoy an ambient mix from Jamie Hudson. This set is archived from the final day of Some Like it Hot, the 6th biennial PARSE conference, November 14, 2025.

Click the link in bio to listen

17/12/2025

Encoding Culture:
The Swedish Cultural Canon through the Lens of Multimodal Dataset Curation

Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado

The formulation of a Swedish Cultural Canon by a committee of experts has sparked debate among cultural agents and the public: while some perceive it as controversial, others value its role in categorising and conserving key historical milestones of Swedish culture. “Encoding Culture” speculates that putting together cultural data as images and text for generative AI training may replicate the mechanisms of canon formation—both reflecting and reinforcing the underlying systems of cultural selection and valuation. AI models would embed the structural norms and biases that govern the intended data selection and organisation. The process of creating image datasets for Generative AI, often viewed as a neutral or purely technical process, encodes not only cultural narratives, but also biases and power dynamics. This paper explores the potential of these models as dynamic, generative systems that create outputs based on patterns, but also potentially embody and transmit cultural values. In doing so, the parameterisation of culture through dataset compilation emerges as a tangible phenomenon: as the algorithm seeks to capture shared patterns and structural rules among the samples, it parallels the concept of a “canon-as-model”. Presented at the 2024 Artistic Research symposium, this ongoing project foregrounds the interplay between programming practices and cultural encoding, where datasets act as reflections and agents of cultural normativity within AI-driven systems, with implications for how culture itself may be shaped in the age of AI.

Keywords: AI, Deep Learning, Cultural Canon, Art, Culture, Generative Art, Swedish Art

https://parsejournal.com/article/encoding-culture/

15/12/2025

Design and Grace:
Actively Not Doing What You Are Able to Do

Erik Sandelin

We tend to think of design as making new things, of designers acting through addition and intervention. But, in a world where human activities often violently constrict the lives of others, how can designers also cultivate creative acts of withdrawal, foreclosure and leaving be? Here I sketch a register of grace in design. My ambition is to provide designers with generative exemplars and concepts for crafting vital, effective and beautiful nos and nots. In the end, the designer emerges not as colonising conqueror, sad militant or connective empath, but as a dirty dancer, who—curiously, cautiously, carefully—practises the dispossession of the world.

Keywords: Design, Grace, Force, Animals, Simone Weil, Michel Serres, Patricia MacCormack

https://parsejournal.com/article/design-and-grace/

12/12/2025

Natureculture Preserve Marhult:
Contaminated Sites as Field, Discourse and Material
Timo Menke

The long-term project Natureculture Preserve Marhult (Naturkultureservatet Marhult), which launched as part of the Småland Triennial in 2023, is concerned with site-specific and process-based investigations of the illegal landfill Marhult (Uppvidinge). Dumped and scattered over the 30-hectare post-industrial sawmill ALEX, approximately 35,000 tonnes of hazardous waste consisting of “fluff” (ground car parts), demolition debris, slaughterhouse waste and various microplastics have since 2015 transformed the site into a toxic terra incognita. The landfill, run by various enterprises with ties to criminal activity adjoining the village of Marhult, poses the kind of multi-complex environmental threat typically associated with the Global South.

The key objective of the project is to investigate and research the dump site as a critical mass of archaeological, ecological and cultural agency ripe with deeply entangled relationships between what we call nature and culture, human and inhuman, or artefact and ecofact. Could waste constitute future natural-cultural heritage? Waste as world heritage? How can artistic processes and transdisciplinary methods investigate, rethink and transform the unknown potential of waste as natureculture? This article aims to present findings and insights, renegotiating the often binary concepts of natural and cultural heritage by considering contaminated sites as field, discourse and material for transdisciplinary processes between preservation, remediation and rewilding.

keywords: Waste, Toxic Heritage, Natureculture, process-based, preservation, remediation, rewilding

https://parsejournal.com/article/natureculture-preserve-marhult/

10/12/2025

The Book of the Dead
David Kelley

My film revisits Muriel Rukeyser’s 1938 poem The Book of the Dead, a documentary work exposing the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, in which hundreds of mostly Black workers died of silicosis. Rukeyser used documentary fragments—testimonies, medical reports, and interviews—to build a poetic montage. I respond to her unfinished film script and experimental method by adapting her work during the Covid-19 pandemic, using a green screen and game-engine software to create a virtual environment. My adaptation replaces her white subjects with Black actors, reframing the racial violence at the core of the tragedy. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s speculative fabulation and Kathryn Yusoff’s critique of geology as racial violence, the film treats infrastructure as both material and metaphor. The work listens to the dead and speaks again, extending Rukeyser’s forensic poetry into a racially and environmentally precarious present.

Keywords: Post-Human, Post-Cinema, Documentary Poetry, Research-Based Art, Essay Film, Labor Exploitation, Immersive Experience

https://parsejournal.com/article/the-book-of-the-dead/

08/12/2025

“When I Becomes We”
Reporting on Making a Poetics for Togetherness Through
Performance Art

Gabriel Bohm Calles, Niclas Kaiser & Christoffel Kuenen

This paper explores how a performance piece can enact and embody conceptual ideas to illuminate what truly matters in the experience of being together. By combining linguistic expression with performative embodiment, the work begins to articulate a new poetics of togetherness—one that offers a scaffold for discourse in psychology and technologically mediated human interactions, while also reshaping how we imagine future relations with Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).

Keywords: Interpresence, Intersubjectivity, Perceptual crossing, Togetherness, Interaction Design, Convergence research, Performance art, Artistic research

https://parsejournal.com/article/when-i-becomes-we/

05/12/2025

Convening on the Land:
Artistic Practices of Indigenous Placemaking

Marit-Shirin Carolasdotter, Sandi Hilal, Geir Tore Holm, Lisa Nyberg & Katarina Pirak Sikku

This contribution presents a series of artistic practices that reflect different aspects of indigenous placemaking. Common among several indigenous cultures is a relationship to land based on principles of reciprocity, where giving and taking is a mutually beneficial practice. This challenges many Western cultures’ tendency to mainly consider land from a utilitarian perspective, prioritising extraction for shorter-term economic gains over more long-lasting values like connection, co-habitation and co-existence. Centring indigenous research, the aim of the panel was to examine the intricacies of placemaking based on principles of relationality and reciprocity. How can we re-think our relationship to land through the practices of art, design and architecture?

Keywords: Sustainability; placemaking; indigenous knowledge; reciprocity; place-specific art

https://parsejournal.com/article/convening-on-the-land/
shirin .ps

03/12/2025

Grito transhemisférico: remediación de Juracán // Transhemispheric Call: Hurricane Remediation

Luis Berríos Negrón, William Cepeda Román, Karla Claudio, Omar Monzón Carmona, Juliann Rosado Pagán, and Raquel Torres Arzola
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This sound work debriefs the public event "Hurricane Remediation" convened by Luis Berríos Negrón for from the 2024 UmArts/VR Hurricanes and Scaffoldings conference. It opens with "El Cacique," a conch shell piece by Puerto Rican musician Dr. William Cepeda Román, layered with field recordings from Rio Maricao Forest Nature Reserve—a biosphere devastated by 2017's hurricanes Irma and María. The recording by conservation biologist Omar Monzón Carmona captures native bird species, while voices from conference participants (marine biologist Juliann Rosado Pagán, curator Raquel Torres Arzola, and artist Karla Claudio) weave through the soundscape.⁠
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The work reenacts the presentations from "Hurricane Remediation," as transhemispheric repositionings of the word "hurricane"—derived from Juracán, a force wielded by the Indigenous Taíno divinity of Guabancex—within its ancestral and colonial contexts. This challenges Nora Khan's use of "hurricane" in her essay "Towards a Poetics..." as merely "a sublime metaphor" for the AI cataclysm. Instead, the authors present Juracán as a thermodynamic portal to values that engage environmental co-inhabitancy and address how colonial memory drives global warming's hemispheric injustices. "Hurricane" is not simply Western symbolic language but an ancestral form that now heightens unresolved trauma. With that in mind, the soundwork asks: sublime to whom?⁠

Keywords: hurricane, climate injustice, Indigenous mythology, environmental art, nature conservation

https://parsejournal.com/article/grito-transhemisferico/

image: Carlos Raquel Rivera, Huracán del norte, 1955, linoleum, collection of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña

01/12/2025

Waves of Movement Through
Suspension Then
Release

by Ameena Aljerman Alali

Since documented history was and still is viewed mainly as autonomous, this essay attempts to challenge history’s formal, disciplined approach with a narrative from the history of enslaved people rather than viewing slavery as an isolated event. Indian Ocean slavery has not been documented as much as Atlantic slavery history, which has led to a gap within the histories of the Persian/Arabian Gulf countries. This essay explicitly examines my own family history as an artist, where the interest in documenting such history was to find ways to relate to and understand the afterlife of slavery. I raise questions regarding the reflection on the remembrance and presentation of enslaved peoples’ histories as part of a process of amendment and as an attempt to fill the gaps in understanding history and the socio-political positioning of Afro-Emiratis. The essay unfolds with its suspension, and then release, in three main narratives that took place in the last century, titled “Fairuz”, “Dalma”, and “Zar”. The methodology is based on interweaving narratives, events, and Afro-Emiratis’ heritage into a stepping stone to document and present unspoken histories.

keywords: Indian Ocean Slavery, Afro-Emiratis, Historical Narrative, Unspoken History, Persian/Arabian Gulf, Afterlife of Slavery, Memory and Remembrance, Socio-Political Positioning, Oral History, Narrative Weaving

https://parsejournal.com/article/waves-of-movement-through-suspensionthenrelease/

11/11/2025

PARSE Issue 22: Hurricanes and Scaffolding launch event

Old Hotel, Valand Vasagatan 50
Wednesday 12 November
17:00- 18:30

Welcome to a feeding for all our senses! We call on you to join our table and celebrate the release of our issue of PARSE. Hurricanes and Scaffolding explores how artistic research can respond to and represent different aspects of the dynamic interplay between more-than-human forces and culturally resilient structures. 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 in 2024. By bringing different ingredients in conversation, we will taste, talk, look and listen, cook and create a gathering to introduce the research we present in the journal. At the table will be Gabriel Bohm Calles, Geir-Tore Holm, Niclas Kaiser, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Lisa Nyberg, Timo Menke and Daniel Shanken.

https://parsejournal.com/event/release-of-hurricanes-and-scaffolding/
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All welcome! The event is free to attend and there is no need to register.

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