The International Encounters of Community and Environmental Sociology will take place this year, once again, in the rural Swedish village of Uddebo from the 4th through the 7th of July. This meeting will serve as a site for participants to exchange and share their experiences and to discuss the future of independent cultural frameworks.
The second edition of International Encounters of Community and Environmental Sociology, New Forms of Contemplation for a New Society, continues to develop, as in the previous edition, as an interdisciplinary space of conversation on how to create new approaches in cultural policies based on the models of the auto-sustainable infrastructures. We have chosen Uddebo as the base of the IECES because we view Uddebo as an inspiring place where one can visualize the ecooperative development of the neighbourhood in helping to organize, enhance, and strengthen the participation of the community. The focus of the event’s program will consist of non-activities, experiences, and participation in the local and social milieu of Uddebo and its surroundings.
For this second edition of International Encounters we have selected a group of international experts specializing in the field of art and culture whose labor is based in the independent cultural framework. Our participants range from artists, thinkers, academics, curators, composers, and architects. The project hopes to bridge the local and the international through creating a place for meeting and conversation between participants in the symposium and members of the Uddebo community. International Encounters creates an opportunity for those involved to share their experiences related to the development of art and cultural projects that are integrated in community and environmental sociology with voices represented both from Uddebo and a larger international community.
The goal of the project is to develop in both the public and private sphere a collective thought or aim that will serve as an important tool in improving the relationship between sustainable development and social integration with the quality of culture. In fact, International Encounters views the relationship between culture and sustainable development an imperative. Bringing various participants together to discuss this topic will serve to create a larger transnational discourse on the imperative to merge cultural thought, sustainable development, and social integration.
The project channels the collective intelligence and viewpoints of each participant and therefore will help to develop and improve the quality of art and culture by contrasting and channeling each participants unique ideas and perspectives.
The project aims to create and foster a cultural and artistic ecosystem with a very active link with the non-state public culture. In this ecosystem the various actors are engaged in a social system outside of the practice of consumption. More specifically, we want to reflect on the systematic dimensions of building a sustainable culture in communities where societies can develop in a direction towards a post-human perspective and a meeting place for the exchange of experiences of participants, whose objective will be to consider the future of this great independent cultural framework.
Producing this event can be viewed in tandem with several of our previous projects where we consider similar themes. For example, our latest work was the creation of a nonprofit organization whose work focuses on promoting research in the sciences and humanities that strives to improve the quality of interaction of all living beings belonging to the same social ecosystem.
This gathering will allow participants to share projects, meet potential collaborators, and find the inspiration to work collectively to consolidate a base for a future network of collaborations between the participating actors and the inhabitants belonging to the Uddebo community.
Video
Photo gallery
Participants
Amalie Frederiksen
Amalie Frederiksen is a curator specialising in site-specific and social art. Amalie runs Another Public – an art agency works with the objective to shape new publics through contemporary art and encourage people to engage in the world around them. As a curator Amalie aims to challenge the conventional structures and disciplines within art and society and bring art closer to everyday life. Her latest curatorial projects are: (AFTER)CARE, 2019 at a hospital in New York, VÆRKDINVERDEN, 2017-2018 at 6 places across Denmark, and CROSS_CUTS, 2016 at The Factory of Art and Design in Copenhagen. Amalie holds an MA in Art History and Modern Culture from Copenhagen and Sydney, 2012
Andrea Kalinova
Andrea Kalinová (1980) studied Photography and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and finished her post-graduate studies at the Intermedia and Multimedia Department of the same university in 2014. She is the initiator of the artistic project Abandoned (Re)creation and director and producer of the movie Off Season. She is interested in the overlap of art and activism, focused mainly on the protection of modernist architecture. By her debut mockumentary The Secret Of One Swimming Pool (2006) she mystified history of a never finished swimming pool under Bratislava’s castle.
Antti Ahonen
Antti Ahonen is a multidisciplinary artist working on the fields of visual arts, performance, media art and photography. As a photographer he specialised in experimental live performances, He has worked for Pixelache festival, Smeds Ensemble, Lá Bas, National Theater, Teak and countless individual artists. One of the organizers of the Pixelache festival (www.pixelache.ac). He also works as artistic director for Association of experimental electronics (www.koelse.org) Association of experimental electronics is a group of experimental elecronics enthusiasts who gather old consumer-electronics and transform it into sound producing devices.
Egle Oddo
Egle Oddo born in 1975 in Italy. Her work focuses on linear and non-linear narration as an art form. Interested in operational realism, meant as the presentation of the functional sphere in an aesthetic arrangement and its inter-relations, she combines photography, moving image, installation, sculpture, environmental art, and experimental live art. In her pieces industrial production morphs towards delicate handcraft, life forms appear and emerge out of sculptures and objects, film photography appropriate digital images, selected trash mix with fashion, precious edible minerals and ancestral recipes are served as part of ritual meals. Her work is present at international biennials, Museums and relevant institutions.
Jagath Weerasinghe
Jagath Weerasinghe is an artist. He received his BFA degree from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, University of Kelaniya and MFA degree from American University, Washington D.C. He is a founding member of the Theertha Artists Collective, and the National Trust of Sri Lanka. He is also a conservator of mural paintings, trained at ICROM, Rome and Getty Conservation Institute, USA. He is a recipient of the David Lloyed Kreeger Award, American University; Bunka Cultural Award, Sri Lanka; Hirayama Silk Road Fellowship; Visiting Fellow, Institute of Archaeology, University of London; ICCROM Fellowship for Conservation Studies, ICCROM, Rome; Visiting Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies, South Africa and Visiting Scholar, University of California at Berkeley and at University of Texas. Currently he is a professor at the Postgraduate Institute of Archaeology of the University of Kelaniya teaching and researching History of Art History, History and Theory of Archaeology and Heritage Preservation.
Ekaterina Sharova
Ekaterina Sharova is born into a family of Northern Russian peasants, and her father worked in a forest at the shore of the Barents Sea before he entered the Philosophy Faculty of the Leningrad University. Ekaterina graduated from an experimental Pedagogical Workshop in Pomor State University, a progressive faculty inspired by Leo Vygotsky and the Elkonin-Davydov system, and University of Oslo. In 2014, she brought Pussy Riot to Norway, that created great media attention. After having learned about the media ignorance about Russian culture, she decided to start a residency and an international art festival in Euro-Arctic Russia. In 2014, she co-founded Arctic Art Institute, which represented Northern Russia at NEMOSKVA and Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art. In 2019, she co-curates an exhibition Fringe for Arctic Arts Summit. She is interested in questions of the ecology of culture, the everyday oppression, and redesigning the invisible.
Juanli Carrión
Juanli Carrión is a New York-based artist born in Yecla, Spain. His site-specific interventions aesthetically respond to the social, political and cultural history of their sites, gathering people, actions, information and geography to reconstruct “the landscape” generated by its inherent conflicts with a strong focus on social and environmental justice. In 2017 he founded OSS Project, Inc, a non for profit organization that started in 2014 as a series of site-specific public interventions in the form of geopolitical gardens that materialize social ecosystems through the use of different plant species as representatives of social groups or individuals. Carrión is a faculty member at Parsons, The New School where he teaches Sustainable Design. He has also been part of lectures, panels, workshops and master classes at institutions like Columbia University, Open Engagement at Carnegie Mellon University, SVA, Pratt Institute, SUNY, NYU, AIA New York Cener for Architecture, Fordham Graduate School for Social Service, Wavehill o Apexart, among others.
Marika Troili
Marika Troili (SE) is an artist based in Stockholm. In her predominantly process-based practice, she often responds to specific contexts / sites and the social and political structure that produce those sites. She works mainly with installation but also with text, performative readings and video. Marika Troili has participated in exhibitions at Marabouparken, Sundbyberg; Skåne Art Association, Malmö; Nida Art Colony, Lihuania; BAK, the Netherlands; Bâtiment d’art contemporain, Switzerland; Maskinhuset in Grängesberg and at the Museum of Work in Norrköping, Sweden, among others. Troili holds a MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Martin Zaiček
Martin Zaiček, (1987), artist, architect and researcher. Since 2011 is a member of the art group Abandoned (re)creation, where together with photographer Andrea Kalinova follows and research the architectural heritage of the 20th century which is connected under the idea of collective recreation. His architectural research is focused on post-war modern movement architectural heritage in the Slovak spa localities. Is a co-author of the books Off Season: abandoned curative house Machnáč in Trenčianske Teplice and Architecture of Care: architecture of the post-war modernism in the Slovak spa localities.
Member of Docomomo International and Archimera NGO.
Mei Szetu
Mei Szetu is a curator and producer who works on a project basis in Norway and internationally. Szetu works to be an active member and contributor to art and culture in Bergen and locally in Northern Norway where she works on dissemination and facilitation of projects that emphasize social practice as art expression in the professional visual art field through the Nyksund Cooperative project (Nyksundkoop.com). As a facilitator, producer, and developing curator and not a performing artist, she wants to facilitate creative infrastructures where it is lacking. This is an interest derived from her background as an economist.
Mirko Nikolić
Through performance and critical writing, Mirko Nikolić seeks to prefigure more just collaborations among different species and heterogeneous bodies. In recent projects, mirko has been working on counter-extractivist ontopolytics, multispecies commoning, performativity of vegetal touch, and unlearning of anthropocentric and capitalist survivalist ideologies. Their works have recently been exhibited at Art Sonje, Seoul; SIC Gallery, Helsinki; KC Grad, Belgrade; P3 Ambika, London. Currently they are dedicated to co-constructing a place-based radio platform entangling forest, mineral and human modes of being in North-East Finland and beyond. mirko holds a PhD in Arts & Media Practice from the University of Westminster, London. Mirko Nikolić works on de-extractivist ontopolytics, unlearning of androcentric/capitalist ideologies of survivalism, productivism and generalised competition, affirming instead naturecultures of reciprocity and shared vulnerability.
Timo Tuhkkanen
Timo Tuhkanen (b. 1983, Muscat, Oman) work intersect between contemporary art and music. Researching artistically the aesthetics between the fields of sound and touch in everyday life and archives, currently their practice involves imagining, designing and creating instruments that act as social interventions and political tools for encountering and including non-humans in decision making processes.
His works as a composer and artist have been featured in Manifesta12 5x5x5 program; Kunsthalle Exnergasse WUK; Museo delle Trame Mediterranee; luftArt Neue Music Berlin; Sound Museum; Nordham Recorder Festival; 3éme Biennale di l’Art Contemporain Casablanca; Emma Museum of Modern Art; FILE Festival; Moscow Philharmonic; Alvar Aalto -museum; Dimitria Festival; Time of Music Festival; AAVE-Festival; Musica Nova Festival; Canterbury Jazz Festival, Canterbury, UK; and the Royal Festival Hall, recorded live on BBC3 Hear and Now.
Tommy Olsson
Tommy Olsson (1963, Lindesberg, Sweden). Artist and writer. Lives and works in Nesoddtangen, Norway.
Team
Yildiz Yalcin
Facilitator
Anto Lloveras
Facilitator
Where Do You Find Us
GULA HUSET, Långgatan 26, 514 92 Uddebo, Sweden
By bus:
from Nils Ericson Terminal in Gothenburg via Borås, Svenljunga or Kina. https://www.vasttrafik.se/
By car:
from Gothenburg: via Route 40 to Borås, then Route 27 to Tranemo and route 157 to Uddebo.
from Stockholm: via E4 to Jönköping, then follow Route 40 and Route 26 to Route 156 in Västra Götalands län.
from Malmö: Follow E6 to Route 26 in Halmstad and then Route 27 to Route 156 in Västra Götalands län.
by air:
Jonkoping Airport (distanced approximately 59 km)
Goteborg Save Airport (distanced approximately 89 km)
Visingo Airport (distanced approximately 98 km)
