grounded: symposium

This 2-day hybrid symposium hosted by the University of Oslo’s Department of Musicology explores garden-related notions of groundedness, soil, trails, reclamation, decomposition, and rewilding and considers such concepts’ relevance for critical approaches to the environmental humanities. Together we will examine how gardens enable alternative perspectives on human relationships to space and time, especially amidst ongoing anthropogenic climate change. Although western thought typically frames gardens as utopian spaces of reprieve, this yearning to convene with tidied assemblages of nonhuman nature reflects our sometimes hidden assumptions about beauty, valuing species, and nature-culture divisions. Gardens are worlds of multispecies encounter that offer olfactory, haptic, visual, and sonic contrast with their surrounding environments. They are also places of waste, decay, messiness, and dirt, and stimulate certain conceptual resonances with destructive human interventions into the earth like mining.

The symposium will include three panel-style discussion sessions, a viewing, a reading session, and an optional group excursion along the Akerselva River. A diverse group of invited scholar-thinkers from across the humanities will discuss ideas-in-progress or offer an “object lesson” to introduce their work. Sessions will meditate on the following kinds of questions:

• How can we cultivate more active understandings or awareness of human entanglements with gardens, parks, or other spaces of “curated” more-than-human nature? What does a practice like “critical listening” (Robinson 2020) have in this endeavour?

• As both environmental artworks and sites that host environmental art (performances, sound art, sculpture, etc.), how might parks and gardens be specially apt for destabilizing western-romantic notions of Nature that still animate mainstream environmentalism, and contribute different angles to these conversations?

• How can we reorient our understanding of gardens, parks, and similar curated spaces as resisting colonialist ideals of species preservation, collection, and consumption of nonhuman life? How can we engage with these places in ways that challenge the boundaries of what constitutes a life, a relational network, or a community?

​

All are welcome!