upcoming

Studies in Remoteness III

art, upcoming

Call for Participation:

BEYOND PLUNDER.
Remoteness in archipelagic and aquapelagic thought

8-11 April, 2027
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University, Sweden
in collaboration with Konstnärshuset (Artists’ House) and Slipvillan Gallery, Stockholm

Aimé Césaire’s writing gives us place as scattered shreds of beloved wastepaper floating upon the water and islands as articulate bodies (annulosa) composed of rings. A locus that floats, held within a “carêne” – an old Genoese word referring as much to a walnut shell as to a ship’s hull. Césaire’s beloved home is fragmented, pieced together from scraps of bodies, paper, nuts, and boats. 

With its third symposium, the international collaborative project Studies in Remoteness takes up Césaire’s archipelagic and aquapelagic thought to theorize across places and peoples subjected to dispossession, extraction, and environmental ruin (Glissant 2009, Martínez-San Miguel & Stephens 2020, Turnbull 2025). Such places and peoples, like Césaire’s islands, are scattered. So too are circumpolar communities scattered. Indigenous homelands fragmented by borders and colonial infrastructures are scattered. Diasporas are scattered. How do we think across these scattered states of remoteness? What relations become visible when we resist the enclosure of “situated” context and address the scattered condition of remoteness as connectedness and affiliation – perhaps, as the ungrounded, fluctuating, tensile rhizome through which solidarity and theory alike can emerge? 

Césaire offers us the metamorphic term hors-flibuste. Translated to English as unfreebootable, modified from the colonial Dutch word vrijbuiter (plunderer, robber), the term gently conjures the image of a loving bond that knows and refuses the logics of extraction, and thus bears witness to people–place relations beyond plunder. We wish to start there, with the unfreebootable love of places-laid-to-waste and with love-languages of resistance that entangle theoretical and poetic thought. This is already exemplified by Césaire – who alongside Édouard Glissant, who first articulated archipelagic thinking – was a Black diasporic poet and decolonial theorist. Césaire and Glissant lived lives that inextricably entangled scholarship and artistry; their works are also consequently expressive of both situatedness and cosmopolitan belonging to the wider world.


Buffer Zone, Sacrifice Zone, No-go Zone, Exclusion Zone, Security Zone

Through the attention of contributors to political logics of wasting (Liboiron & Lepawsky 2022) and necropolitical infrastructures (Mbembe 2019), the symposium Beyond Plunder expects to foster a site for critical inquiry of distance, marginality, and peripheralization. The peoples and places living under colonial and imperial systems that devalue them are increasingly labelled with the term “zone” and drawn into political imaginaries of remoteness as the unlivable site where no one, in their right mind, would or should remain. Even so, these logics of destruction implicitly expose the very entanglement between bodies and lands that colonial and imperial epistemes would seek to deny: For who would displace the burdens of extraction, ruin, and dispossession onto others, except those who already (if only negatively) recognize a deep mutuality – an enduring interdependence – of people and place?


A Sea of Islands: Archipelagic conversations from the Polar to the Equatorial 

In her recent book Ice Geographies (2025), scholar Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) discussed Fijian anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa’s articulation of Oceania as “a sea of islands”, and his contrasting of Oceanic homelands and homeseas with imperial vision, which has long reduced such places to “islands in a far sea” (1994: 152). Addressing Oceania within her work on Arctic colonial politics of race and indigeneity, Smith found resonance in how Oceania and the Arctic alike have long histories as military testing grounds used by nations that construct such places as “remote” for strategic advantage. Thus, when Smith interacts with Hau’ofa’s work, she emphasizes “remoteness” not as a the far remove of Oceania and Arctic from each other, but as a colonial construction which systematically diminutizes and devalues both places among the vast elsewheres which then compose colonial peripheries. 


Who we are looking for 

Studies in Remoteness is dedicated to fostering an intellectually rigorous and practice-inclusive context equally open to researchers, educators, artists, curators, architects, community leaders and elders, activists, students, among others. The project aims to create meeting grounds for collaborative and community-based research and artistic work that critically and productively inquires infrastructure, visibility, performativity, and historicity. As a study circle within the Nordic Summer University, we are able to offer ECTS points to students. 

For this symposium, we look forward to applications from people whose work contributes to re-evaluation and re-theorization of people–place relations and systems of plunder, expendability, and waste. We aim to bring together contributors who might think archipelagically and aquapelagically across a diversity of land and seascapes – moorlands, bogs, fells, desert, steppes, taiga, tundra, estuaries, mudflats, and dune fields – and the communities who live there. We would warmly welcome contributors who work in island studies (nissology), circumpolar studies, human geography, blue humanities and oceanic studies, Indigenous studies, diaspora studies, critical heritage studies, Baltic and Nordic studies, environmental humanities, posthumanism, human ecology, art history, performance studies, and critical colonial studies, among others. We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.

How to Apply 

The Studies in Remoteness April 2027 session “Beyond Plunder” will be structured to privilege lingering attention and in-depth conversation among participants. Therefore, spots for contributors are limited. Applicants are invited to envision contributions up to one hour in length (research presentations, performances, artist talks, experiments, and reading and/or discussion sessions).

Applications should include
[a] An extended abstract (up to 600 words) of the proposed contribution (1-2 pages);
[b] up to 1-page bio of the presenter(s).
2-3 pages total please. Precaritized artists, students, and scholars living in Stockholm and the surrounding region who express exceptional need can be considered for participation with the fee waived. 

Email applications to: lindsey.drury@fu-berlin.de and helenahildur@gmail.com by 15 January 2027. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis, applying earlier is encouraged. 

Costs 

While travel and hotel for the April 2027 symposium in Stockholm should be self-organized by participants, the Studies in Remoteness co-coordinators will organize an inexpensive overnight option in the city. We also warmly welcome requests for support letters for individual funding applications for those attending and regularly correspond with our participants about funding opportunities that coordinators and contributors are pursuing. 

Symposium & Membership Fees 

Nordic Summer University Annual Membership is a contribution made by all participants annually to support the volunteer-run, democratic, and independent academic organization. 

  • 70 € – Reduced rate fee (20 € for the symposium, 50 € Nordic Summer Uni. membership fee)*
  • 150 € – Standard fee (50 € for the symposium, 100 € Nordic Summer Uni. membership fee)**
  • 230 € – Supporting membership (80 € for the symposium, 150 € Nordic Summer Uni.)*** 

*The reduced-rate fee is for individuals with an annual income below €25,000, as well as students, early-career researchers, retired, unemployed, working in precarious or low-income circumstances. 

**The standard fee is for individuals with an annual income between €25,000 and €50,000.

***The supporting membership fee is for individuals with an annual income above €50,000, as well as institutions or individuals whose membership is funded by their institution, employer, or research grant.

About Studies in Remoteness 

Studies in Remoteness: Sensoria of Absence, Distance, and Neglect is coordinated as a study circle within the Nordic Summer University by performance historian Dr. Lindsey Drury (Freie Universität Berlin / Germany) and artist Helena Hildur W. (Sweden), with team members Theol. Dr. Shiluinla Jamir (Nagaland/India) and PhD candidate Tinka Harvard (Åbo Akademi, Finland/USA). The April 2027 symposium Beyond Plunder is organized in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Karolina Enquist Källgren (University of Stockholm, Sweden).

Studies in Remoteness does foundational theoretical, artistic, and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. To unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of “remoteness” – particularly, in the circumpolar North – we center Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism, as well as artistic and embodied approaches, in a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028. 

The project turns its attention to the notion of “a place far away”– be it the regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of Indigenous/minoritized communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; sub-cultural meeting spots or your neighbour’s kitchen. Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. With lingering attention, Studies in Remoteness intends to unsettle conditions of obscuring or exoticizing – resolutely acknowledging histories, topographies and epistemologies with an eye to how these might come into “intense proximity”, as coined by Okwui Enwezor. 

As a three-year collaborative research project, Studies in Remoteness brings together a network of scholars, artists, and activists to engage in community-based research practices. By establishing a co-creative space for community building and artistic practices – open for the sharing of facts, questions, concerns and practices – we believe that our work will prove enduringly relevant.


–––



Studies in Remoteness condensed study plan summer 2027 – summer 2028:

  • Nordic Summer University Summer Session and Summer School, 23-30 July 2027
    (Hola folkhögskola, Kramfors, Sweden) Topic: Infrastructures of Remoteness 
  • Winter Session, March 2028 (Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, Enontekiö, Lapland, Finland)
    Topic: Sacredness and protection 
  • NSU Summer Session and Summer School, July 2028 (Baltics, venue tba)
    Topic: Being Lost


Read more:

Studies in Remoteness Userblog at Freie Universität Berlin,
https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/remoteness/

–––

Call for Participation, Sources Cited: 

Césaire, Aimé. 1939. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Volontés. 
— . 1950. Discours sur le colonialisme. Parislation, Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard. Hau’ofa, Epeli. 1994. “Our Sea of Islands”, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 148- 161. 

Glissant, Édouard. 2009. Philosophie de la relation, Poésie en étendue. Paris: Gallimard.

Liboiron, Max & Josh Lepawsky. 2022. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. Boston: MIT Press. 

Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda & Michelle Stephens. 2020. Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. London: Bloomsbury. 

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Smith, Jen Rose. 2025. Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Turnbull, David. 2025. “Archipelagic/Aquapelagic Processes and Shifts in the Geography of Reason and Law in Island South East Asia: An Approach to Resisting the Enclosure of the Common Heritage of Mankind”. Theoria, 72(185), 32-57.: Éditions Réclame. 

Studies in Remoteness II

art, upcoming

Call for Participation:
TIME WORK. Debt, inheritance and intergenerational practice

Second gathering of Studies in Remoteness, part of the 2026 Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University. 

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (monoprint 1920); photo credit Wikimedia Commons

CfP excerpt:

“Let’s call it ‘time work’: those practices that negotiate the relations between the living and the dead. Time work is not merely conducted by archivists and historians, but by grave diggers and undertakers, documentary filmmakers and memoirists, knowledge bearers, politicians, war journalists, practitioners of living traditions, speakers of dead languages, as well as by any and all who keep something – a story, a trinket, an heirloom, a song – holding onto it to remember. Time work is not easily done without feeling; It is driven by the weight of mattering, it is attention called by the fact that now – this, our, now – is in-part composed by the shadows of what and who came before. Time work is haunting work, it whispers of recurrences (‘this happened before’), and implicitly describes the present as a thing pushed to the surface of existence by the collective force of innumerable spent lives, over centuries, over millennia.

In the summer 2026 Studies in Remoteness symposium, we explore the ways that time work might destabilize the remoteness of history (its absence, distance, and neglect). How might we describe the work that transforms time into a weighted force that accumulates, persists, and can be carried forward, often across generations? Through what actions is one accountable to the past? What does it mean to hold or carry an inheritance? In what ways are people indebted to those who came before, and how might the living “pay the debts” that have accumulated over generations? What kinds of temporalities do different approaches to time work produce, and what social relations are then enabled or foreclosed? Through these questions, the symposium reflects on the entanglement of debt and history, exploring debt as an enduring paradigm that variously informs intergenerational relations, systems of oppression, and historical justice.

We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.“

 – READ THE FULL CFP HERE –

 

Dates: July 24- 31, 2026
Place: Saulkrasti, Latvia

Welcome to apply!

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 0)

art, time-out, upcoming

After a final round of proofreading, the whole batch of programmes is printed out; and so is the letter that will be read out loud to accompany Joël’s in-home performance tomorrow. Coffee, tea, snacks and fruit are purchased and brought to the Freie Uni. Signs showing the way to all locations are made and printed, and mounted on doors and signposts inside the building. The nametags and pens are ready for use. Joël has done his shopping, too, and now prepares the performance dinner.

One more thing: Monica’s workshop requires two rolls of paper; one normal drawing paper, and one transparent, the kind that architects use. Tinka and I head out in the city to find it; it’s already dusk, as we slip along a rivulet through an area of allotment gardens. We find the store and pick up the paper rolls – Monica confirming over the phone they’re the right ones – and then start on our way back… but in our excitement, we keep walking on and on, missing a left turn and crossing the river before we find ourselves back on the map again.

This city of Berlin – in itself a cluster of townships, gathered around the river Spree and her smaller siblings, sprawling out towards the lakes and wetlands – may be more imbued with history than any other place I’ve visited. Also, much of what I remember from central Stockholm in the 1960’s and 70’s  is still present here; the small backyard workshops and industrial buildings; the old, sometimes (not always) dilapidated houses with stone tilings, glass mosaics and flights of stairs disappearing into darkness; the ruderal spaces – neither parks nor gardens, but tiny spots of wilderness living on by their own – and the geographical proximity between vastly different urban structures and communities, that one may experience in just passing from one block to another.

Yes, a long and busy day… and tomorrow, it will begin for real.

 

Duplicity / Duplicität Symposium (Day 00)

art, upcoming

Tuesday morning begins with breakfast at Lindsey’s, then a slippery walk on pavements all covered with black ice. Yesterday, S-bahn trains were cancelled due to ice on the tracks; today, luckily, they’re back in traffic. The trip from Wedding to Steglitz takes approximately 40 minutes, then another walk from Rathaus Steglitz to the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at Freie Universität Berlin. Here, the sidewalks are carefully sanded since our path coincides with the direction to a meeting point and facility for the community of blind Berliners. Gratefully, we trod along following a gentleman finding his way by help of the white stick.

This is my first visit to the Freie Uni. (and, in fact, to Berlin). I try to make myself familiar with the venues booked for the symposium, as Lindsey prints the first copies of the event programme. It’s difficult to imagine that all these things are actually going to take place here; that all these people will soon show up in person… Still two days to go.

For the afternoon, I decide to visit Haus am Waldsee further out in the Southwest part of the city, to see the exhibition we’ve added as an option for Sunday’s programme: Weathering by Beverly Buchanan.

Leaving the Freie Uni, I see a man writing something in the snow covering the windshield of a yellow car, then continuing to the next one to leave another message, before he strolls on along the road… Arriving at the Rathausplatz, I realize today is January 27th – the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

The Haus am Waldsee turns out to be a museum of modest proportions, a patrician villa within a large English garden, dedicated mainly to contemporary art since 1946. The ongoing exhibition – works by Black American Artist & Diva Beverly Buchanan (1940-2015) and London/Amsterdam-based artist Ima-Abasi Okon touches me deeply. Buchanan’s equally headstrong and compassionate way of moving forward as an artist, bringing forth the dignity of vernacular architecture in rural US Georgia (and thus, of its builders and dwellers) and carrying out toilsome projects rooted in experiential understanding of power structures and history; paired with the walls painted by Okon with bee pollen soaked in water, in a colour floating between dirt and gold, and conveying a heavenly scent through the light-filled spaces.

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In the evening, Remoteness team member Tinka arrives from New York City and we move into the hostel apartment that Lindsey has provided for us. Tomorrow will be a busy day…

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

Studies in Remoteness I

art, upcoming

The first call is out – come join us in Berlin!

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION:

DUPLICITY / DUPLICITÄT: Betwixt Intimates and Strangers

NSU Circle 1 Winter Session 2026
Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin
January 29-31, 2026

Due date for session proposals: 1st December, 2025
Due date for non-presenting participant registration: 9th January, 2026

This opening symposium of the collaborative research project Studies in Remoteness explores remoteness as connected with duality, in-between spaces, self-conflicted states, and epistemic ambiguity. We will examine remoteness as a way of being situated (perhaps conflictedly) between apparently different identities, geographies, and epistemologies. Even as the word ‘duplicity’ suggests masked deceitfulness, its implication of the two-sided and two-faced provides a means to query the dichotomies (distant and near, intimate and stranger) experienced by those labelled “remote”.
We particularly invite proposals that engage with voices and worldviews often marginalized or erased in dominant knowledge systems.

Photo © Salad Hilowle, from the exhibition Homeplace;
courtesy Cecilia Hillström gallery (Stockholm)

Event Structure
The symposium begins with a welcome evening on the 29th, and is then divided into two themes over two full days (30th-31st). Sessions will include presentations, readings, discussions, and creative workshops that draw from cultural studies, performance histories, and artistic research practices. Participants are invited to lead thematic sessions, but do not have to do so to participate. Within the context of Berlin, the symposium will further inquire the ways that duplicity informs observation by investigating the cityscape as an intricate weave of depths and surfaces, concealments and revealments.

Thursday, Jan. 29th: Welcome evening
Introduction, presentation round and get-together dinner.

Friday, Jan. 30th: Inquiring Art, Politics, and Performance in Berlin
How does duplicity inform, arise from, or interact with the politicization of art in Berlin? What is concealed (made remote) and revealed (made available) in the process?

Saturday, Jan. 31st: Intangible Goods/Invisible Architectures: Performing Deindustrialisation
How does duplicity inform people’s everyday lives? How does it affect the city’s inhabitants – architecturally, aesthetically, as well as in work and everyday practices? What is made remote, and what is made available in economic transactions, public infrastructures, and the wider built environment? How can we research peoples’ experiences of this, and the impacts upon their lives?

Participation fee
Participants need to pay a €30.00 membership fee to the Nordic Summer University; for participants with institutional support, the amount is €55.00. In certain cases, this fee may be waived or reduced. Housing and food are self-organized, and the organizers have reasonably priced recommendations for registrants.

How to Apply
– if you wish to lead a thematic session (research and/or artistic presentation, reading session, hands-on or discussion session) – please submit an application (up to two pages) with a session abstract and facilitator bio by December 1st, 2025.
– if you wish to simply participate – please send us a letter of intent, and a bit of information about yourself, by January 9th, 2026. Earlier applications are encouraged, as the symposium is first-come-first-served. Students may receive ECTS credit (further information available by request).

Applications can be sent to to one of (or both) the following email addresses:
lindsey.drury[at]fu-berlin.de
helenahildur[at]gmail.com

Studies in Remoteness is coordinated as a study circle within the Nordic Summer University by the scholar Lindsey Drury and artistic researcher Helena Hildur W, in cooperation with – among others – project members Tinka Harvard, Shiluinla Jamir, and Essi Nuutinen.

Read more:

Duplicity/Duplicität 
Almost any place on this planet labelled “remote” by one person is to another an intimate home. Almost any stranger met on the street is, to someone, a most intimate friend. No place or person, then, is ontologically remote. Instead, remoteness emerges as a condition paired with its opposite. Remoteness is duplicit.

Duplicity often carries connotations of trickery – as a disguise that renders the reality of a person or situation inaccessible; remote. The term duplicity thus gestures toward performance. Yet, acts of pretend, staging, or performance aren’t merely façades behind which reality lurks; they also offer ways of conjuring real contexts for social engagement. Antonin Artaud’s Le Théâtre et son Double, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie, and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism all tie art and performance to politics by addressing duplicity as a political and creative force that divides and connects, hides and reveals, undermines and sustains – to transform. Artaud, particularly, makes the radical proposal that perceivable reality is a respondent Doppelgänger of the theater (rather than the other way around).

As anthropologist David Graeber described, politics is a fundamental social imaginary – “that dimension of social life in which things really do become true if enough people believe them” – but to participate effectively, one must never acknowledge this fact (2011: 94). Graeber used this assertion to connect politics to artistic practice, further arguing that, “for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game – a kind of scam” (ibid). While the term “scam” typically implies deceit or fraud, this symposium considers the “scam” as a kind of strategic duplicity that enables both art and politics to function – not in spite of, but through their resistance to absolute transparency. The imagined, the artificial, and the staged become crucial mechanisms by which social and political truths take shape. While “scams” are negatively connotated (perhaps most easily attributed to quacks, charlatans, imposters, grifters, and snake oil salesmen), in this symposium, we look at the so-called “scam” as a duplicity that, precisely by undermining any chance for so-called ‘transparency’, allows art and politics alike (and in connected ways) to function.

In Berlin, this dynamic can be exemplified in Adrian Piper’s 2017 participatory performance The Probable Trust Registry at Hamburger Bahnhof, which invited viewers to sign contracts with themselves, committing to ethical principles such as aligning their actions with their assertions. Though the contracts were non-binding, the work adopted the aesthetics of bureaucratic authority – golden desks, formal presentation, institutional context – to lend them weight and seriousness. In doing so, the work “pretended” (in German, vorgehabt) in the original etymological sense – to put forward or give forth (especially of) illegitimate claims – demonstrating how acts of imagination and presentation have historically blurred into claims of power, identity, and truth. Piper’s performance reveals how duplicity can create the conditions for sincerity. The work thus operated in the tense space between the real and the unreal, using the artifice of officialdom not to deceive, but to make truth socially legible.

The city of Berlin’s architecture is shaped by a history of small industry and local craftsmen. Many of the city’s spaces have been transformed into a postindustrial landscape of corporate offices, bars and restaurants, arts organisations, storefronts, and living spaces. The city is physically marked, by consequence, with visible duplicity of the original intent and current use of its architecture. A realm of urban aesthetics has emerged that explores the way this duplicity can be exposed and concealed. This architectural duplicity is expanded into political space via buildings like the Reichstag and much problematised Humboldt Forum, both of which play with the partial presence and absence of historical materials in the ways they have been reconstructed.
A similar ethics of in/visibility permeates the performance and presentation approaches within urban service industries, where the labour of vast numbers of workers is labelled as “intangible goods”. The service industry is informed by a complex history of labour deeply engaged with performances of concealment and revealment. Like theatres, for example, restaurants are organized into a “back of house” site of preparation and production which facilitates a “front of house” space of presentation and consumption. The relationship between these two sites is often central to the restaurant’s approach to the dining experience: a working kitchen exposed to the meandering eyes of restaurant patrons is representationally different than a restaurant that conceals cooks and their labour behind a wall and a swinging door, only to be visible as inferred craft within completed dishes. Duplicity, then, is not simply deceptiveness – but it renders parts of life and work remote in order to curate economic interactions.

This symposium invites reflections on duplicity as an aesthetic, ethical, constructive, and political practice: how it structures relations of trust and suspicion, performance and belief, transparency and opacity. We welcome participants who wish to explore the multiple registers of duplicity, and interrogate its role in shaping both everyday life and collective futures!

***

About Study Circle 1:

Studies in Remoteness does foundational theoretical, artistic, and historical work toward initiating a new field of interdisciplinary research in critical remoteness studies. To unpack the geopolitical, environmental, and cultural dimensions of ‘remoteness’ – particularly, in the circumpolar North – we will center Indigenous scholarship and critiques of extractive colonialism, as well as artistic and embodied approaches, in a series of six symposia across the Baltic rim between 2026-2028.

The project turns its attention to the notion of “a place far away”– be it the regional peripheries or cartographic borderlands between nation states; the residential areas of Indigenous/minoritized communities; historical testimonies and lacunae; sub-cultural meeting spots or your neighbour’s kitchen. Theorizing modernity by turning to its so-called outskirts, the project inquires sensoria of absence, distance, and neglect that have blossomed along the frontiers of colonial empires and sedimented among the margins of modern infrastructures of “global connectivity”. With lingering attention, Studies in Remoteness intends to unsettle conditions of obscuring or exoticising – resolutely acknowledging histories, topographies and epistemologies with an eye to how these might come into “intense proximity”, as coined by Okwui Enwezor.

As a three-year collaborative research project, Studies in Remoteness brings together a network of scholars, artists, and activists to engage in community-based research practices. By establishing a co-creative space for community building and artistic practices – open for the sharing of facts, questions, concerns and practices – we believe that our work will prove enduringly relevant.

***

Studies in Remoteness Nordic Summer University webpage
Studies in Remoteness Freie Uni Berlin webpage

Featured image (above):  Feierabend. Nordufer Ecke Fennbrücke, Berlin-Wedding, November 2022
(People walking home from work. Nordufer corner of Fennbrücke, Berlin-Wedding)
Attribution: Babewyn via Wikimedia Commons – thank you, Josh, for your generosity and your beautiful photos!

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​ l​and 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.

Art’s Birthday Rebirth: Soundtower Growing Roots

art, recent work, upcoming

Being part of the Ljudtornet (Soundtower) sound/art platform has been inspiring, joyful and rewarding in so many ways… From the beginning in 2018, we have realized six ANTENN festivals in the old Watertower of Gnesta (engaging almost a hundred Swedish and international sound artists, musicians, filmmakers, and other exhibitors/performers); we have made web radio broadcasts reaching listeners globally; and since 2020, we have celebrated Art’s Birthday on the 17th of January by making original sound/art installations.

From the Watertower into the forest; photo HHW.

When the local municipality decided to lock the watertower permanently in 2023, the Soundtower staged a mourning march and farewell ceremony. We lost a homeplace, but the spirit stayed with us; we kept on collaborating, in various constellations, and kept in touch. In November 2024, some of us took part in a manifestation for Ulvaskogen/Wolves’ Wood – a local forest, threatened by brutal logging. From this event, a seminal thought began to grow… and on Art’s Birthday 2025, the seedling reached the light.

The Soundtower is growing new roots… 

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“The Light in Wolves’ Wood” event, Nov. 17th, 2024;
contributions by Soundtower artists Julia Adzuki, Patrick Dallard, Tomas Björkdal, Rolf Schuurmans, Helena Hildur W, the Ministry for Environmental Grief;
photos by Eliot Freed

Praxis of Social Imaginaries, Summer session 2023 (Palanga)

art, recent work, time-out, upcoming

End of July, and a group of scholars and artists meet up to continue the journey that begun in March: studying the Praxis of Social Imaginaries. Observing our own times through the lens of mediaeval travel accounts, this transdisciplinary research project is now turning to William of Rubruck and Marco Polo – both speaking to us from the 13th century.

“The journey of William of Rubruck to the eastern parts of the world”
Marco Polo, “The Travels”

Summer session readings: the travels of friar William of Rubruck (photo credit Laura Hellsten) and Marco Polo’s Book of the Marvels of the World

A diverse bunch of people we are, actually representing all continents except Oceania; diverse also in age and cultural background, not to mention other kinds of situatedness… Reading under the pine trees in Palanga Botanical Garden brings out knowledge and memories from Sápmi and the Amazonas. Listening to voices from the 13th century brings out concern for the silence(d) in history. The ‘brave space’ of genuine dialogue brings out deep emotions of grief, joy and care… as well as the interchange of intellectual perspectives.

The Praxis project will continue for another two years – partly within the alternating Winter and Summer sessions of the Nordic Summer University, and partly in parallel side projects; next gathering planned in November, at Sigtunastiftelsen north of Stockholm. I’ll  have some mapping work to do before that… For now, I wish to cherish the creative flow that emerged from sitting beside Ilona Blumgrund, and our thinking together swiftly and wordlessly.

With great gratitude to Ilona, Adriana, Jackie, Louie, Emilia, Roberto, Tinka, Eduardo, Dorcus – and, of course, co-facilitators Lindsey Drury and Laura Hellsten – à la prochaine!

Mapping on the beach; how to realize common values in colonizing the future

About the Nordic Summer University
This particular study circle is but one out of a dozen, which together constitute the Nordic Summer University. From July 27th to August 3rd, the NSU Summer session 2023 was held in Palanga, Lithuania. Keynote speakers Ekaterina Kouznetsova, Amanda Valentin and Epp Annus all focused on different aspects of democracy in our time; academic freedom in an authoritarian society, election monitoring, and Russia’s colonial engagements and imaginaries of supremacy. In daytime, study circles worked independently (and sometimes joined). In the evenings, cultural programs were offered – such as music, workshops and multilingual readings (a practice introduced by Lara Hoffman last summer)… Together with Alina Kalachova, I conducted a mapping event which made us think, as well as cry and smile. A valuable experience.

Keynote speaker Epp Annus presenting a poem by late writer Victoria Amelina (killed in Russian strike on Kramatorsk, July 1st); and a joint reading of short stories on the beach

About Palanga and Hotel Vysuris
The venue and the city itself deserve some attention, too. Hotel Vysuris, built under the Soviet regime, stays almost unaltered since the 1970’s; history alive in many aspects, also in the struggle of the kitchen staff to navigate between different instances of need and want. The long applause they got at the final gala dinner was well earned.

(above) Vysuris restaurant and the last evening’s gala dinner
(below) Some features of the labyrinthic, circular building

And finally, some touristic views from walking in  Palanga – and a treasured gift (thank you so much, Dorcus!):

stenen från Dorcus (kopia)