“Time Work” Symposium In Hindsight

With two months hindsight; what did we bring from Studies in Remoteness’ Summer Session with the Nordic Summer University in Latvia?

On July 23, I arrived in Saulkrasti and reached hotel Minhauzen Unda; a Soviet-time building complex, close to the Baltic sea shore and surrounded by a deep, airy wall of high pine trees…

Arriving in Minhauzen Unda, Saulkrasti, Latvia

–

…and with the high-flying fabulist Baron Munchausen installed to be the patron of the establishment.

Time table for Time Work. Debt, inheritance, and intergenerational practice
(NSU Circle 1, Studies in Remoteness’ Summer Session 2026)

On July 24, all study circles were gathered, and participants greeted with a welcoming dinner. About half of our circle are returning friends from the Winter Session in Berlin, and the other half are newcomers; a good mix, and again a wonderful bunch of people. With the new morning, our programme begins with a brief introduction, followed by a workshop with Agnese Cēbere: Forming Words in Latvian… an appropriate start to ground us in this place where we are all newcomers. Afterwards, we split up in smaller groups to listen to each others’ thoughts on the concept of “remoteness”.

Saturday morning, July 25: “What is ‘remoteness’ to you?”

A large piece of canvas – serving as a tablecloth during the Winter Session in Berlin – is now turned into an improvised projector screen for Tinka Harvard’s lecture on The Melt Archive: Water, Memory, and the Work of Attention.

Preparations, arrangements, notations; writer, poet and theologian Tinka Harvard in lecture.

Leaving her notes behind to speak from the heart, Tinka’s words opened up another poetic dimension where oceans and melting ice speak memories of destructive powers as well as awareness, care and love…

Raging wildfires in California kept our next speaker Adrian Centeno hostage; we missed him dearly, but were treated with architect Monica Tușinean’s reflections on tensions between an architects’ prestige and the craftsmanship of builders.

From the next days, only a few highlights remain… because the flow and intensity of exchanges left little space for documenting.

Sunday is a day of outdoor workshops: walking, pausing, observing, drawing and reflecting. Prof. Paul Landon brought us to the scattered ruins of a Soviet era summer camp; left to decompose in the greenery, drawing hard-handed courtship from graffiti tourists…

Prof. Paul Landon introducing the group to the uncanny familiarity of modernity’s ruins

…and on Monday, the canvas screen is improved by Nikola with a string and clothes pegs from the always helpful reception ladies; now ready for Dr. Shiluinla Jamir’s presentation Rethinking Contemporary Animism from the space of Remoteness, with respondent Prof. Bendanglemla Longkumer joining us online from Fiji.

Tuesday, July 28: Excursion Day. A long, lonely walk along the stretch of sandy beach, where the Baltic sea may gift a piece of amber or a “witch stone” to some lucky wanderer. I was happy to just breathe with the winds and waves – approaching, withdrawing…

–

…soothing, powerful and precarious. Pebbles and gentle sunshine; undercurrents, quicksand.

How do we move along with the flow of life, without hurting or getting hurt? How do we act responsible, and where does one’s responsibilities stop? How do we act freely?

Going, returning. Bare feet touching ground. Landscape turned real estate; layers of history.

Contemporary architecture and Soviet summer camp estate for sale; two sides of the same road

For Tuesday evening, the canvas screen found a new application, displaying (reverse) filming in Guy Dolev’s performance lecture Cow Park; a hommage to the struggle of the Jerusalemite Armenians to protect their historical ground – once a field for grazing cattle, today a parking lot carrying great significance in the community’s social life.

Artist, researcher and teacher Guy Dolev setting up the Cow Park scenography

Wednesday, then, is largely dedicated to lectures on historical events in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania; three countries with very different, although sometimes converging, fates. This lecture series form the sub-project Shared Stages, Entangled Pasts, funded by the Baltic-German Liaison Office and connecting us to distinguished scholars in the region. We’re also invited to track the bear regalia of the Mamalilikulla people all the way from 19th century Canada to a museum depot in Berlin; to follow the anarchic movement of vagabonds in 1920’s Germany; and to visit the late 20th century’s “countercultural” hippie/settler/prepper utopias in US West coast states – in three lectures by (respectively) Lindsey Drury, Timo Kaemmerer and Johanna Gilje.

Thursday is already wrap-up day – but first, a few more beautiful contributions… among them, setareh fatehi’s Parallaxing-(i): a walk on a shaky bandwidth took us on a walk in the park – in Saulkrasti, and simultaneously, via a groupchat, in Tehran – recreating human dignity in remote presence; followed by Nikola Markovic’s film Spectral Garments and Reworking of Time in the Balkan Family Archive, starring Nikola’s grandmother… an excerpt from a larger work that I hope to come back to in the future.

The canvas made its final appearance as an archival surface during the closing discussion; a playground for the winds, waves and undercurrents of a weeklong shared experience.

Gala dessert and clean-up time; leaving Latvia by bus and ferry

After the last evening’s gala dinner, and the last morning’s cleaning and resetting of our assigned space, only the goodbyes remain before homeward journeys begin. Back home, I handwash the canvas and enjoy a sweet soft almond candy from Tehran with home-made rhubarb lemonade – immersed in the richness of the experience.

A time to rest and reflect. A canvas carrying memories. A stone, gifted from one of the magic-working reception ladies.

For the months ahead: process, discuss, think forward, make decisions… More (very) soon!

Mapping Praxis X: Obinna’s Itinerary

art, beauty, recent work

This object has taken form slowly, over the course of more than a year – beginning from a second interview with Obinna, one of the returning participants of the Praxis of Social Imaginaries study circle. Our very first conversation took place already in the summer of 2024; Obinna then told about fertile farmlands in the hilly parts of Enugu State (Nigeria) and the University of Nsukka, the light and heat of a brief stop-over in Dubai, and the whiteness of snow-covered Turku (Finland)… and offered me a seashell from a sandy Danish shore. When we met next time, in March 2025, I was still hesitating over how to begin this mapping; I asked Obinna for more information on his birthplace. In addition to providing more details, Obinna gave me a startling cue: “it has to be a 3D map”.

By then, I had done some reading on historical maps. I also knew that Christianity is the predominant religion in southern Nigeria – maybe that was what sparked an association to the 6th century traveler, monk, and zealous Bible reader Cosmas Indicopleustes.

Cosmas Indicopleustes’ world model, showing the World Ocean embracing a continent crowned by a huge mountain, behind which the sun passes – thus creating the difference between night and day.

During the partial solar eclipse of March 29, I made a cardboard maquette of Cosmas’s peculiar world-as-a-shrine model. The semi-circular sides of the lid brought another association as I watched the moon disc wandering across the sun: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half a Yellow Sun.

From cardboard maquette to wooden chest with doors and lid; hibiscus print on East African fabric; painting sketchwork, tempera painted world map (modified) and lapis lazuli lid

Over the next months, I cut the bottom and walls of the chest from parts of an old door, and fit them together with hemp string; crafted papier-mâché for the vaulted lid; and formed a mountain and a little house from air-drying clay. I asked for Obinna’s opinion on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I read that deeply moving novel of hers, and furthermore some articles on Nigerian art history – learning a little more about the complexities of this giant nation. In August, we met briefly again; among other things, we discussed instances of cultural appropriation versus cultural exchange, and Obinna brought my attention to the ancient Nsibidi writing.

During the following autumn and winter, various renderings of Obinna’s Itinerary were tried and rejected. In the end, this mapping came out less focused on social interactions, and more tuned in to the inherent beauty of the world and the ways we imagine it.

Half sun, half moon; hibiscus wallflower borrowed from a textile design by Wax Mama; green foliage and Nsibidi script; a journey through clarity and confusion…

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day four of three)

art, recent work, time-out

…yes, day 4 out of three – because the programme got so rich, that it just didn’t fit within the settled time frame.

On this wintery Sunday morning, some participants decided to rest and digest, while others were homeward bound – to Trondheim, Porto or Los Angeles… The rest of us made a choice between the Weathering exhibition at Haus am Waldsee, or a sound walk / dérive in the former East Berlin district of Lichtenberg.

Screenshot

Landsberger Allée – Arendsweg – Pyramidenring – Alte Rhinstrasse
(Google Maps screenshot)

I head for the sound walk, taking the M6 tram to the stop at Schalkauer strasse where Katt is waiting. Soon enough, Eli and Paul join us. Incessant through traffic rumbles along the Landsberger Allée, and a biting wind rattles the flaglines in front of IKEA as we cross the huge parking lot. South of the walkway, the windowless metal façade of a giant wholesale warehouse closes the view. Above Rhinstrasse, a towering high-rise: Die Pyramide – a prestigious 145 million € project completed a few years after the German Wiedervereinigung, soon a cause of financial disputes, later sold to a real estate developer… now a post-modern monument well past its prime.

From Pyramidenring, we turn left to proceed along the back side of this glass-and-granite complex, where it turns into a long stretch of lower building blocks alternating with narrow yards where trees stripped of leaves comb the wind. From Eli, we learn that Alte Rhinstrasse marks the border to a no man’s land, of sorts; or rather, a “some men’s land”, since violent right-wing groups claim the space beyond this old road – now a backstreet – making it a no-go place for those in focus of their aggressivity. A little further up the street, a rusty boom barrier and a sentry box with flaking paint still monitor a former industrial area, disused since decades.

“90’s Curtain Wall Grotto, Berlin”; photo by Katt Hernandez

A man exiting from a gym in the Pyramide’s side block allows us to slip inside to hide from the cold a few minutes. As we gaze at empty windows, empty stairwells, empty name plates on metallic information boards, Katt evokes images of families walking by on their way to the shopping malls on a sunny autumn’s day… A phone signal rings; it’s Lu, looking for us and asking us to send her a live position on Whatsapp. We hurry out to meet her in the street, and suddenly find ourselves back at the Landsberger Allée just outside the main entrance of the Pyramide. To our surprise, the doors are unlocked and we can walk inside.

Screenshot

“Die Pyramide” main entrance (Google Maps screenshot)

Vast, blank surfaces. No sounds of human presence, except for our own footsteps; we fall silent, too; unsure about how to behave. Cautiously, we sneak towards the high row of black pillars… behind which a security guard is relaxing by the reception desk. He offers us various folders and prospects from the enterprises housed in this office hotel. We thank him politely and return to the street, where the M6 line takes us back to the city center. We finally join with the remaining group for a warm Georgian lunch at Kin Za restaurant, before breaking up.

However, this sound walk / dérive stays with me. In little more than an hour, a stroll of perhaps 2 kilometers in seemingly dull surroundings caught an incredibly complex image of recent German history, architecture-as-ideology, financial manipulations, flows of communication and commodities, varying conditions for people’s everyday lives, and the continuous cycle of quiet growth and decay within the city’s ecosystem of flora and fauna. I hope to hear Katt’s violin tell more about this brinkscape practice… and I’ll bring the experience into the continued work of Studies in Remoteness.

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day three of three)

art, recent work, time-out

… and how could the spirit of the second day be carried forward now – bursting with intellectual and emotional energy as it was?

The answer turned out to come almost by itself, with a change of pace: from yesterday’s parallel strings of concise case studies swiftly followed by verbal exchanges of Q’s and A’s, to extended presentations creating space for a deeper listening; for resonance, outwardly and inwardly…

The first feature of Saturday’s programme, sound artist Hector MacInnes‘ Collective Listening from Echo to Interference, carried us from Berlin to the the Isle of Skye, inviting us to roam and rest within a delicately composed soundscape of voices: repeated calls for contact, interlaced with distinct impressions and reflections on records, intimacy, and distance – evoking feelings of loss and sadness, imbued with a sense of care. A tentative call for solidarity?

Above: Hector MacInnes in dialogue with the group, after the Collective Listening experience
Below: Katt Hernandez waiting to present Brinkscapes as Practice (left);
“Kungens Kurva strange utility hut”, photo credit Katt Hernandez (right)

Next, musician and composer Katt Hernandez performed a dérive in urban peripheries, cutting through notions about desolate wastelands by addressing the warehouses, shopping malls, and vast parking lots as comforting sites of everyday human presence and protective anonymity, fondly naming them brinkscapes. The rhythmical sequence of pictures, speech, and silences unfolded as if tuned to inaudible music – eventually set free to sound by the fiery and tender voice of Katt’s violin.

The journey continued as media artist, professor Paul Landon took us to Arctic landscapes in the Cold War era, where military demands employed the “perceived nothingness” of supposedly uniform expanses of dazzling snow, as the DEW (Distant Early Warning) system was erected across Alaska and Canada; a massive effort turning self-sustaining ecosystems into a backdrop for the demonstration of power and cutting-edge technology.

For the extended lunch break, Paul sent us on a mission:

– Go for a walk in the neighbourhood and look for an empty space that resonates with you; document what you find, so that you can present it to the group; stay with your chosen spot for a while, trying to perceive, understand and interpret it; from this experience, think of a public intervention to amplify, alter, celebrate or comment on its particular emptiness.

And so we did.

Two hours later, the group reassembled to share the documented emptinesses: an inaccessible yard; a snow-covered balcony; a construction pit; a beanie hat lying in the street, lost from the head it used to protect; a gap in the flow of consumer goods in a vendor machine…

Above: Prof. Paul Landon sharing pictures from his personal collection of emptinesses
Below: an emptiness captured by Caitlin McHugh

We shared photos, and more: we shared, unguardedly, our sustained attention, our awareness towards qualities and emotions, our personal renderings – stirring interest, reflections, compassion, and friendly laughter – in a flow already present yesterday, now broadening and deepening like a river.

For my own part, this workshop remains a highlight; first, spending time on my own in the midst of these intense days, and then returning, respirited, to co-create with to peers, now become friends.

Duplicity “emptiness” excursion along Grünewaldstrasse – Paulsenstrasse – Rückertstrasse – Brentanostrasse
(photos by HHW.)

A coffee break, then another workshop: Phenomenographies of Absence and Duplicity. Re-drawing Post-Communist Industrial Ruins by architect Monica Tușinean. Drawing and tracing paper rolled out all along the table, graphite pens and thick black markers distributed, instructions given…

Above: re-imagining Romanian industrial heritage sites by drawing “phenomenographic vignettes”,
workshop by Monica Tușinean
Below: Essi Nuutinen gives us monsters

The playful excitement of the drawing workshop was gently redirected into focused common attention by Tinka Harvard, serving as moderator for the programme’s last section. As eyes turned back to the projection screen and the room fell silent, Essi Nuutinen introduced us to the Icelandic finngálkn, or onocentaur; a hybrid human-animal being, signifier of inherent duplicity and vehicle for imaginative moral thinking; a creature of folklore and Christian allegories appearing in the mediaeval book known as the Physiologus. The Icelandic manuscript in itself carries a story of transformation, as it went from being a valued keeper of knowledge, to having its pages torn apart and perforated by hundreds of tiny holes – surviving the centuries repurposed to separate coarse meal from finer… a sieve. A membrane.

After moving upstairs to another venue – the DanceLab – the intertwined themes of ethos, body, and mediaeval history were continued by Lindsey Drury, in her performance lecture Bitter Gall: Dance and Colonial Nausea. History inherited as the “past-in-body-present”; the body, a receptacle torn by conflicting forces; ethos, the values and practices that sifts out the self.

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From Lindsey Drury’s performance lecture Bitter Gall: Dance and Colonial Nausea

I cannot reduce this performance lecture into words; I will not even make an attempt. But it stays in my sieve, like the coarse and nutritious elements of stone-ground wholemeal – not to be disposed of, not to throw up, but to be digested over time. I will carry it with me, as a part of who I am, for times to come.

For a final vignette, I return to an engraving visible in one of the photos above: Sebald Beham’s The Peasants’ Feast (month of December). I see the woman. I see her steady gaze beholding her witless, spewing partner, while leading him forward in dance; her expression does not tell of any judgment.

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day two of three)

art, recent work, time-out

Come the second day of this adventure… beginning at 10am sharp with Elsewhere as structure: a panel on coloniality, migration and distance, with two of the speakers present online from Southeast Asia. Urban ethnographer Dr. Elisa Bertuzzo opened the panel with another flip of perspectives, recounting how colonizers of the past proudly filled Europe’s novel, prestigious botanical gardens with “exotic” plants – while today’s immigrants are accused of spreading “invasive” species when growing kitchen vegetables from their home places in South European backyards. PhD student, architect, and designer Lu Lin shared her work on dual belongings and cross-cultural design proposals, carried out between China’s Wenzhou region and Italy, together with immigrants and returnees. Concludingly, Dr. Theol. Shiluinla Jamir reflected on Lifestyle as Resistance (an intriguing essay by Prof. Veena Talwar Oldenburg in 1990), raising questions on how moral life is performed in a socio-spatial sphere of “remoteness”, and what it could be to lead a good life.

From the “Elsewhere as Structure” panel: hybrid meeting preparations;
two slides and a close-up from Elisa Bertuzzo’s presentation;
a mapping exercise shared by Lu Lin (all photos by HHW.)

After lunch, the programme divided into three parallel tracks in the Graduate Students’ Panels. I sadly missed out on the Epistemologies and the Erasures panels, as I followed four presentations on Embodiments – by Sophie Schultze-Allen, Caitlin McHugh, Tinka Harvard and Cadenza Zhao – insightfully moderated by Prof. Paul Landon and artist Jody Wood, with beautiful exchanges also between the panelists.

Sophie Schultze-Allen on “Decolonial Ecologies in Dance”, and feedback snapshots from Cadenza Zhao’s presentation on “Embodiment of Duplicity” (all photos by HHW.)

After a coffee break – offering some time to share reflections more informally – we all gathered to listen to presentations on Distance, Performance and Documentation by PhD student and theatre director Omid Mashhadi (Dokumentartheater Berlin), and visual artist Dr. Kerry Guinan (Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary, Gothenburg-Stockholm); again, generating many thoughts as well as lively exchanges.

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Slide from Mashhadi’s rehearsal work with Ukrainian refugees at the Dokumentartheater Berlin;
participants taking notes;
a slide with content creators from Nepal, Egypt and Ukraine on live video stream, from Guinan’s work “Portraits”;
snapshots from discussion between Mashhadi and Guinan (all photos by HHW.)

To complete this abundance of experiences and perspectives, we were finally invited by artist Jody Wood to calculate our Virtual Credits and Residual Guilt Reserve in her workshop Abrechnungsbüro – an engaging, thought-provoking and fun exercise, followed up by a conversation between the artist and philosopher-writer Lieke Knijnenburg. Aptly moderated by PhD student Sofia Attolini, it also involved participants, and continued well into the Berlin evening, during dinner at a nearby Chinese family restaurant…

Above: “Abrechnungsbüro” snapshots
Below: social practice artist Jody Wood and composer Olga Krashenko in following discussion
(all photos by HHW.)

…and we still have a full day ahead in this symposium. More to follow…

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (day one of three)

art, recent work, time-out

Time is almost 2 pm, and we’re at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft of the Freie Uni. Berlin: a building once known as the Haus der Deutschen Forschung – in the years of WWII containing a lecture hall and a library, a ballroom, a casino, fifty offices and an air raid shelter; and, according to journalist Ernst Klee, housing a “cover-up community”, where “an enormous ‘degree of agreement between politics and science'” took place.
Zur Geschichte des Instituts für Theaterwissenschaft

Today, on January 29th, 2026, the coffee table is set outside the DanceLab, and name tags are waiting to be written and attached. People arrive, crossing the imposing foyer to find their way, continuing upwards via the symmetrical double staircases, heading for our more modest localities on the top floor. The footsteps and voices, the greetings and questions and answers tell of uncertainties as well as excitement.

Within an hour, we have welcomed most of our participants. It’s time to move; we’re going to the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture, where the recently installed director Jonas Tinius will host the first session of the Duplicity symposium…

Due to EU General Data Protection Regulations, I’ll share only a few photos from the actual session here; Dr. Orlando Vieira Francisco (i2ADS Research Institute in Art, Design and Society, University of Oporto) presenting on Formenvielfalt-Farbenvielfalt: New Ecologies from the Museum to Artistic Research – an artistic line of thought, which (to my understanding) touched in a very personal way on the polarity between form and colour / drawing and painting / discerning and integrating… followed by Dr. Monica Tușinean (architect and researcher at the University of Stuttgart), sharing her work on post-communist industrial ruins in Romania – from which I borrow a slide (below).

Slide with hare borrowed from Monica Tușinean’s presentation “Phenomenographies of Absence and Duplicity”

Dr. Jonas Tinius both opened and closed the panel, first by presenting the (Para-)Archive as a site for investigations into how archives come into being; and, eventually, by taking the whole audience on a guided tour in the Archive’s enchanting basement.

Click the link, and follow Jonas Tinius along on an earlier tour in the Archive’s basement:
euroethnoberlin Landesstelle Re-Opening!

For those of us foreseeing (and lucky) enough to have reserved a space, the evening continued in a Wedding apartment with performance artist and cook Joël Verwimp’s In-home dinner and artist presentation WHEN IS A SHIRT? Collective Futures of Fascism.

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Joël Verwimp, “WHEN S A SHIRT? Collective Futures of Fascism” performance
Photo credits: Essi Nuutinen

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 000)

art, recent work, upcoming

Still a couple of days to go before the opening on Thursday. Preparations…

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Ice on the tracks delayed train traffic throughout Denmark and Germany yesterday, and offered plenty of time to make name tags from scrap paper and safety pins.

Finally, a warm welcome and a tasty meal in Berlin, followed by the final (?) proofreading of the symposium programme.

Download the full programme here:
Duplicity/Duplicität Winter Symposium Programme

Introducing the Studies in Remoteness

recent work, upcoming

The Studies in Remoteness is a study circle framed within the Nordic Summer University, set to begin in January 2026 and ending in 2028. We’ll meet twice yearly, for a Winter and a Summer Session (the latter being integrated in the annual gathering of all circles in the Nordic Summer University).

Studies in Remoteness deals with the ingrained notion of “far away places” – be it the regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of indigenous/minority communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; the sub-cultural meeting spots or your neighbour’s kitchen… With lingering attention, our studies intend to reset conditions of neglect and exoticism – unfolding the histories, topographies and epistemologies of such places “far away”.

Based in the Nordics, the Studies in Remoteness study circle will keep the circumpolar Arctic as a recurring theme – while actively inviting the perspectives of de-colonial thought and indigenous research from all continents, as well as practices grounded in feminist, queer and artistic approaches.

The Studies in Remoteness will be co-coordinated by Dr. Lindsey Drury of the Freie Universität in Berlin, and myself, Helena Hildur W. – in collaboration with (among others) Dr. Shiluinla Jamir, poet/writer/theologian Tinka Harvard, and PhD student Essi Nuutinen, as well as current and former board members of the Nordic Summer University.

We warmly welcome scholars, students, artists and activists to engage with us in exploring the potentials of Remoteness!

Contacts
lindsey.drury[at]fu-berlin.de
helenahildur[at]gmail.com

Studies in Remoteness study plan

Winter Session 2026
Topic: Duplicity / Duplicität: Betwixt Intimates and Strangers
January 29–31, 2026 – Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin
This opening session explores the two-sided, the between spaces, the self-conflicted, and the epistemic ambiguity and multiplicity that emerge from these. Engaging with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems, we will examine what it means to be situated (perhaps conflictedly) between radically different identities, geographies, and epistemologies.

Summer Session 2026
Topic: Intimate engagement with historical remoteness
July 2026 – Latvia, venue TBA (NSU Summer Session)
Set within the Baltic context, this session considers the emotional and material legacies of remoteness as lived through history. We will explore how historical displacements, erasures, and distances are felt and remembered in intimate ways, drawing on personal and collective memory. This gathering invites an affective turn in the study of remoteness, focusing on its textures, rhythms, and deep temporal resonances.

Winter Session 2027
Topic: Circumpolar Remoteness
March 2027 – Stockholm, Sweden
This event focuses on Arctic and subarctic contexts. We will draw on Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism to unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of northern remoteness. The session aims to build translocal solidarities by linking Arctic struggles with broader conversations on colonial geography.

Summer Session 2027
Topic: Infrastructures of Remoteness
July 2027 – Nordics, venue TBA (NSU Summer Session)
This session investigates the built and bureaucratic structures that create, sustain, or “overcome” remoteness. From roads and cables to administrative systems and zoning laws, infrastructures mediate experiences of distance, disconnection, and neglect. Participants will analyze how these material forms shape spatial hierarchies and consider what decolonial or alternative infrastructures might look like.

Winter Session 2028
Topic: Sacredness and protection
(early) April 2028 – venue TBA
This session examines the entanglements between remoteness, sacredness, and practices of protection, asking what is being protected, by whom, and to what ends. While sacredness can offer a vital language of resistance and refuge – protecting landscapes, cultural sites, and spiritual traditions from commodification and harm – it also risks being mobilized in the service of exclusionary and securitized nationalisms. In the Nordic/Baltic context, where histories of occupation, resistance, and identity are deeply tied to land and place, we will critically assess how appeals to the sacred may be co-opted into ethnonationalist narratives that frame cultural heritage as a bordered asset under threat. Participants will explore how protection can drift into securitization, where remoteness becomes less a zone of care and more a frontier to be policed. The session encourages nuanced discussion on how to differentiate between emancipatory and repressive forms of protection – and how the sacred might be reclaimed without being enclosed by nationalism.

Summer Session 2028
Topic: Being Lost
July 2028 – Baltics, venue TBA (NSU Summer Session)
This gathering embraces the affective and existential dimensions of being lost – physically, conceptually, or temporally. We will consider how disorientation can unsettle fixed understandings of place and self, opening up space for new orientations. “Being lost” will be treated not as failure, but as a method for inquiry, reflection, and resistance.

Read more and follow the project:
Studies in Remoteness

Featured image (above): Senator Lisa Murkowski visiting the Faroe islands, 2019
Attribution: United States Senate – Office of Lisa Murkowski, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Below: an Usambara violet (Streptocarpus ionanthus), a species classified as “near-threatened” in its native habitat – the Tanzanian Usambara (Dughulushi) mountain range, where cloud forests are today increasingly being cut down in order to give way to extended agriculture. Collected in the 19th century by British and German colonizers, further examined and propagated in Europe, the Usambara violets now survive largely as pot plants on narrow window sills around the world.

Mapping Praxis Working Remotenesses II

art, recent work

What, then, will I bring from the Nordic Summer University’s gathering in Jyväskylä? I remember calm sauna evenings in the soft darkness of late July, as well as the vivid democratic process that maintains the Nordic Summer University and defines its upcoming activities… From visiting ongoing study circles I recall the mapping of conflicting interests in Belarusian and Lithuanian places of heritage; the re-imagining of time from a queer perspective; the enactment of a Parliament of Things, on the hot topic of in vitro fertilisation in Poland… to mention just a few highlights.

And, above all, I bring the experience of a teamwork that fulfilled its purpose of co-planning the concept for a new three-year circle. During the week-long gathering, our proposal for Studies in Remoteness was presented, discussed and approved by the NSU board, and confirmed by the General Assembly of NSU members. Planning is now underway – but this, I feel, deserves a separate post. I left Jyväskylä feeling deeply grateful for this new opening.

Mapping Praxis Working Remotenesses I

art, recent work

While the Praxis of Social Imaginaries study circle was coming to an end in 2025, its continuation took form during the recent NSU Summer Session – this year gathering not far from the city of Jyväskylä in the Lake District of central Finland. Leaving Stockholm on Sunday evening, July 20th…

Stockholm – Åbo/Turku – Jyväskylä – Korpilahti

…I reached the Alkio-Opisto folk high school in Korpilahti after 20 hours of travel. The staff people were welcoming and helpful, it was good to meet friends and colleagues old and new, and delightful to have a swim in the nearby lake – immersing oneself in its summer-warm, velvety body of water.

Tuesday morning began with scheduled work in the nine established study circles of the Nordic Summer University; the tenth group being our working team. On Tuesday afternoon, we presented our draft for a coming three-year cycle of Studies in Remoteness for community review. The proposal got substantial feedback, which we continued working on during the following days. A few of us were attending on-site in Korpilahti, others could join in digitally when needed. Those of us present also had time to visit some of the other study circles – among them Circle 1, Places of Heritage and Circle 7, Meta-Perspectives on Climate Change Knowledge; later also the circles on Critical Theory, Queer Materialism and Feminist Theory. In each circle, urgent topics were presented and processed in various productive ways; these visits were thought-provoking, not least in trying to understand how our future study circle could add constructive perspectives and relevant methodologies to the Nordic Summer University as a whole.

The Remoteness team was assigned a workplace located at a corridor’s end, beyond the pool table and the soda machine. Having passed a row of portraits of stern-looking men, we opened the door to a neat classroom, containing pot-flowers as well as an exercise bike, a row of large windows, an interesting document hanging in a frame on the back wall…

Entering the ‘Studies in Remoteness’ workplace.
A translation of the text above the tiny photos in the framed picture would be
“First Parliament of the Finnish people, 1907 Disbanded on April 6th 1908”;
an impressive number of women were present (I can spot at least five in the close-up).

… and lo! a world map. After spending the past two-and-a-half years with mappings of various kinds, I cannot un-see the colonial implications of a North-above, Europe-centered map. Having improvised a large table in the middle of the room, I could lay down the map horizontally – still Europe-centered, but at least accessible from all sides. This position invited a more playful approach… A handful of tiny pebbles did the rest.

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Playing with pebbles on a world map – shifting perspectives, from Nagaland (India) via Berlin, Oslo and Stockholm (Europe) to New York (USA); these are places where the ‘Remoteness’ team members are currently based.