Exhibition: Advancing waters!
How will a warmer climate affect our coasts and how much will the sea levels rise? And what happens to the society when the landscape is changing? Researchers at SLU raise these questions with the exhibition Advancing waters! (In Swedish: Vattnet kommer!) which will be shown at SLU Ultuna September 11 - October 11, 2017.
The exhibition
There is no doubt that sea levels are rising, but how fast are they rising and what are the consequences of extreme weather events such as storms and deluges? It is impossible to say exactly. However, we must plan for what can happen.
The exhibition Advancing Waters! portrays landscape changes, management responses and strategies in relation to rising sea levels. Research results in the natural sciences encounter methods based on art and design, with the aim of providing greater scope for understanding, but also accepting, in order to respond appropriately.
Using examples from Skåne, Europe and other parts of the world, the exhibition reflects how people, decision-makers, architects and planners in vulnerable areas are reacting to the threat of rising sea levels in planning and design of a changing landscape and how alternative methods can lead to different responses, depending on the most appropriate countermeasures. Visitors can test their own ideas on a blue table of delta sand.
The exhibition language is Swedish.
The three parts of the exhibition
Understand!
Here you find out something about why the ocean levels are rising, and how and why it affect so different. We are talking about waterdrops that expand and about melting ice, but also about the character of the beaches and the expansion of land elevation contribute to that the rise in sea levels affects differently. And last but not least, we emphasize the knowledge that the ocean is rising, but for the future we do not know how much and at what speed.
Accept!
Here we create an understanding of the coastal landscape's dynamics, where the sea even without the sea level rise actually varies during the day, the year and related to weather conditions. Sometimes it is loud or violent, sometimes retracted or calm. Already today, the sea takes land, but also returns. With the sea rising, changes in the long run become more extensive, and this is important to discuss. What values are at stake? And what lost values must we give us time to mourn?
Dancing students: With the task of "wandering the future waterline" and "dancing the waves" movements, choreographers and students developed a choreography along a imagined high tide a stormy day in a hundred years. The choreography gave the students new knowledge and opened a public debate in the local library and in media.
Act!
Here we show with different examples from Sweden and abroad, how to relate to the threats of sea level rising or storms that threatens to ravage beloved landscapes and major societal investments. The examples are by no means comprehensive, but rattle from a construction of protection in a "conflict" with the ocean, to "renew the relationship with the sea" through cooperation: create landscapes with the ocean, be in it or eat and drink it.
Background
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The exhibition Advancing waters! (In Swedish: Vattnet kommer!) raises the issue of the sea levels rising and how it will affect our coasts in different ways. It is also about how we - politicians, planners, insurance companies, locals, etc., handle these expected changes. And how do we communicate these questions?
Curator for the exhibition is Professor Carola Wingren at the Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, SLU. Graphic design and scenography by Design Annika Carlsson and printed material by Mediaverkstaden Skåne, Malmö.
The exhibition is based on a research project funded by the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency and is the outcome of a collaboration between researchers Tomas Germundsson (project leader), Department of Human Geography, Lund University, and Carola Wingren and Kristina Blennow, Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management at SLU Alnarp.
The exhibition was first arranged last winter at the Form/Design Center in Malmö. This autumn you can experience a revised version of the exhibition at SLU in Uppsala. It is part of the acitivities celebrating SLU turning 40 years as a university and coinciding with SLU's Environmental monitoring and assessment turning 20 years as a line of business.
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