Nordic Summer University

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. 

“Time Work” Symposium In Hindsight

art, recent work, time-out

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!

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 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.

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.

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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.

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.

Praxis of Social Imaginaries, Summer Session 2024 @Løgumkloster II

art, recent work

What stays with me now, from the work of this summer session?

I remember the many scenes of unbearable cruelty, committed by the Spanish conquistadores and described in the book of friar Bartolomé de las Casas; and also the absence, throughout his text, of genuine encounters between the author and men and women of the indigenous. Nevertheless, he advocates their right to human dignity and eternal life through Christ. Maybe las Casas – acting in the name of God – kept his eyes so firmly set on the realms of afterlife that he didn’t really perceive the persons in front of him.

I remember the exercise we carried out in pairs, silently observing each other while recalling our first encounter; the recognition and tenderness of the moment. And then, the following actualization of another first encounter: a recorded reading of a document conceived in 1513, by which the conquistadores proclaimed the authority of the Spanish king over the land they were about to conquer. The very act of reading this Requerimento aloud – in Spanish – on any shore where they set foot was taken as a justification to kill, loot and ravage without restraint.

Excerpt from Guillaume le Testu’s Cosmographie Universelle selon les Navigateurs, tant anciens que modernes
(1555/56); illustrated map of Brazil (left); detail (right)*

I remember the words of my fellow participant from South Africa: colonialism is still here.

I also remember images from contemporary dance performances in Mexico; the mixture and fusing of traditions, spun around mythical events and historical figures from both sides of the Atlantic – an in-between space of creativity, pride, grief and resistance. And I remember the group’s (re)enactment of a Mexican mourning ritual: one of us acting the deceased, resting on the ground; the others bringing flowers, colourful pieces of fabric, and whatever we could think of to symbolize respect and appreciation; laying the objects down to adorn him, and thereafter weaving him an invisible canopy of words of affection.

2024 07 ES 03
…and now, he’s gone; photo credit Essi Nuutinen


* to see more of Guillaume le Testu’s work, go to: Cosmographie Universelle selon les Navigateurs, tant anciens que modernes