Mistra Environmental Communication participates in an exhibition at Färgfabriken

Färgfabriken, together with Virserum Konsthall, and Skellefteå Konsthall are collaborating in the Listen! Project that looks at how we perceive and communicate climate change from an emotional perspective. Listen! is a forum where young people, researchers, and artists can explore and relay their experiences and feelings in relation to climate and places. By listening to each other’s experiences alongside research, the project seeks to reach a common understanding of the consequences of climate change, no matter where we are.

Nico Carpentier, Extraordinary Professor at Charles University in Prague and WP-leader for WP 5, Media and Arts, participates in the exhibition with three video essays of the “Silencing/Unsilencing Nature” video series.

"Silencing/Unsilencing Nature unpacks the discursive-material relationship between humans and nature, and reflects on how nature often has been silenced. At the same time, it investigates how nature can be given a voice and become unsilenced again” says Nico Carpentier.

The video essays explain how human control is exercised over nature, partially through discourses – structured ways of thinking about the world, ourselves and others – and partially through human’s ability to manipulate the material world.

“But our discourses are not perfectly stable and all-encompassing; they are object of political struggles and thus contain many contingencies, contradictions and gaps. Moreover, the material world has its own agency, and is not perfectly malleable by humans. It resists our manipulations” says Nico Cartpentier.

These gaps and resistances also open up opportunities to rethink our dominant ways of dealing with nature, and allow us to develop discursive-material practices that take nature seriously, and empathically speak from nature’s perspective. One example, developed in the video essays, is the position of the wolf in the zoo assemblage, how these animals are discursively and materially entrapped, and how their voices can be made audible and gain more strength.

The essays have been developed through a collaboration between Färgfabriken and the Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism (ICSJ) at Charles University in Prague, within the framework of the Mistra Environmental Communication.

The exhibition opened on 12 September 2020 and will run until 29 November 2020.

Read more about the exhibition at Färgfabriken.se