Program & Schedule

Program Day 1 | 28 October

Location: Salen in ZEB-building (Public transit: Blindern Tbane station).

All sessions are 90 minutes, and times are listed according to the local time in Oslo.

*NB: The order of sessions may be modified leading up to the event. Check back for updated details by early October.

12:30 || Welcome Reception

Time for attendees and presenters to gather in Salen.

13:00 || Introduction and Viewing

Cana and Sadie make introductions and offer a screening to set the tone for sessions to come.

15:00 || Session 1: Performance and/as Labour

Rowan Hawitt (KU Leuven)

In the spring of 2022, gardens began to pop up across Scotland in unlikely locations: in a lane off a busy town high street, a car park, even the back of a truck which journeyed around the northernmost reaches of the mainland. These 'Unexpected Gardens' were part of a large-scale project - Dandelion - funded by the Scottish and UK Governments, which was intended to increase cultural and scientific participation in food growing. At each garden, Musicians in Residence were hired to create music and run community workshops, culminating in harvest festival celebrations and food-sharing across the sites in September 2022. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with these musicians, I explore the complex interplay of culture and gardening as a multispecies, community enterprise which unfolded during Dandelion. In particular, I highlight the tension between the aims of the project (to facilitate access to seasonal produce and greenspace) and the realities of food poverty and social exclusion which the musicians faced. I thus position music-making in the Unexpected Gardens as a simultaneous reflection and refusal of the social and cultural fallout from ongoing austerity in Britain.

Veera Kinnunen (University of Oulu)

"Smelly conversations – developing metabolic imaginations through urban composting"

The presentation explores how adopting alternative waste practices may affect human-environmental relations by analysing urban composting method called bokashi, which has recently been gaining popularity throughout the Global North. Based on her ethnographic study among Finnish bokashi practitioners, Kinnunen illustrates how bokashi-making changes the way practitioners relate with waste, microbes, and soil and gives space for new metabolic imaginations. Kinnunen explores how bokashi makers attune themselves into the needs of the waste matter in a very sensory and visceral way. Kinnunen focuses specifically on sensory -- and not always pleasant -- engagments with bokashi, which is conceptualized as a mode of reciprocal communication with the more-than-human world.

Sadie Menicanin (University of Oslo)

“The Machine in the Garden: Contemporary Ecopoetics and Outdoor Pianos”

This talk imagines a piano as the “machine” in Leo Marx’s famous formulation about the American environmental imaginary (1964). Using piano-centric examples, I trace a spectrum of eco-poetics in musical-environmental art. On one end is Hunter Noack’s open-air concert series “In a Landscape,” which leverages the United States’ “wilderness” as the backdrop for Noack’s piano performances. On the other is Annea Lockwood’s composition “Piano Garden,” in which she instructs the performer to leave a piano in a dug trench to weather and decay.

These examples are particularly salient because pianos, I suggest, are powerful metonyms for “capital-m Music” in Western thought; pianos are readily taken as an Ur-symbol for “all” Music, which despite being inherently technological (Tomlinson 2015) is often in its “purest” forms idealized as “natural.” Located outdoors, Noack’s and Lockwood’s piano works encode multiple mythologies of music and the environment: Noack’s concert series promulgates romanticist and humilibristic (Daughtry 2020) notions, disguising its own embeddedness in the carbon form (Iturbe 2019) and relying on the moralistic, anti-technological stance of “ethical naturalism” (Ingram 2010). Conversely, I suggest that Lockwood’s composition registers a subversion of this naturalizing mythos, partly through its emphasis on silence and decomposition, and its alignment with what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought” (2010).

Program Day 2 | 29 October

Afternoon location: Salen in Tøyen hovedgård, Oslo Botanical Garden.

10:00 || Group Excursion along Akerselva (optional)

Starting point: Jerusalem Bridge / Bru (gather at 10.00, depart 10.15)

Closest transit: tram numbers 11, 12, or 18
Stop: Sandaker Senter

End point: Anker Brua (c. 11.30)

This historical tour / soundwalk will focus on the industrial history of the Akerselva. We will make a few stops at important buildings, bridges, and waterfalls, and make time for listening along the way. Comfortable footwear that can accommodate some mud, slippery surfaces, and hilly conditions is recommended.

You are welcome to join or leave the tour as you wish, or to continue after we finish at Ankerbrua to the river's termination at Bjørvika.

13:00 || Session 2: Regrowth, Waste, Afterlives

Samuel Solnick (University of Liverpool)

Cemeteries (which are frequently conceived as, or contain, gardens of remembrance) are cultivated green spaces for reflection and mourning within urban environments. They are part of an infrastructure of death, often established due to public health concerns (e.g. cholera in the 19th century) and which have always brought to the fore questions of human and more-than-human health – not least in cases where burial practices can pollute the local environment. Moreover, due to the legal protections (sometimes) afforded them, they provide vital ecological niches for wildlife and sites of urban re-wilding, especially now that the emergent trend for ‘eco-burial’ is giving rise to a new sense of human/non-human entanglement in relation to questions of waste, decomposition, and monuments/memory.

Trine Brox (University of Copenhagen)

Based upon fieldwork in Dharamshala, in the foothills of the Indian Himalayan state Himachal Pradesh, I present a case that disrupts the idealized image of “Divine Dharamshala,” known for its spiritual significance and stunning scenery. My presentation zooms in on a waste dump by the entrance to a sacred landscape, the forest path encircling the residence and temple of the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader, His Holiness the Dalai Lama. This overflowing dumping hotspot attracted scavenging animals, including macaque monkeys, stray dogs, ravens, and abandoned cows. They competed for food waste, behaved aggressively, and scattered waste throughout the forest. The unaesthetic litter, the stench, and the aggression created significant challenges for local residents, leading to the decision to transform the wasteland into an ecopark after years of complaints. In my presentation, I ask: How has this space at the edge of the sacred landscape become a magnet for waste and scavenging animals? What are the ecological and social impacts of this disruption? How is the concept of the “ecopark” being imagined and designed to address the issues of unruly, menacing waste and wildlife, as well as people’s waste practices and religious practices?

Cana F. McGhee (Harvard University)

This work-in-progress presents my initial forays into understanding Blackness through music, sound, and plant-care. One of my inspirations for this work is Brooklyn-based plant mom, @plantkween, whose social media platform deftly gathers together an array of identities: plant, human, disabled, queer, Black, femme, living, ancestral… @plantkween’s powerful meditations on multispecies entanglement use music, sound, and notions of voice to conjure up memories of family and ancestral lineage through intimate plantcare practices. How does planthood enrich the contours of Black sonic practice, and claims to racial identity more broadly? What do we gain by accounting for the “plants” of the “plantation," and their relationships to the descendants of enslaved laborers who worked those lands? And how might reclaiming that history constitute a radical practice of loving and living under anthropogenic conditions?

15:00 || Reading Session (Mushrooms, Decomposition)

Attendees will reflect on and discuss two reading selections (see "Documents" page to download the readings):

Patricia Kaishian and Hasmik Djoulakian, "The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline" (2020)
Kristina Lyons, "Decomposition as Life Politics: Soils, Selva, and Small Farmers under the Gun of the U.S.-Colombian War on Drugs" (2016)

17:00 || Session 3: Media and Materiality + Closing Ceremonies

Joe Browning (City University of London)

This "object lesson" centers the Ring-necked parakeets that often perch, in large numbers, in and around a particular tree in Kensington Gardens in central London. I will talk through some work in progress that explores what the voices of these birds might mean in a time of ecological concern. The parakeets – non-native, but well-established in London's parks and found throughout the UK; variously considered invasive, beautiful, noisy, and cute – offer surprising perspectives on the interplay between cultivation and ferality in the Anthropocene, the colonial logics structuring classifications of species and sounds, and the political and affective dimensions of interspecies encounters. I will also discuss an augmented reality artwork that incorporates the voices of these parakeets alongside the sounds of other species found in the park, considering how digital media are becoming bound up in our experiences of gardens, parks, and the more-than-human world at large.

Sarah Comyn (UC Dublin)

Taking an early twentieth-century sketch book of South African mines and botanical gardens as its starting point, this work-in-progress will explore the tensions between itinerancy and being grounded in the artistic and literary discourses of mining and minerality, particularly those of the British southern settler colonies. Prompted to follow the literary form of the mining sketchbook and scrapbook, the paper will sketch, cut, paste and explore various sites of itinerancy and groundedness from the auriferous and diamondiferous to the garden abecedarium of colonialism.

Mehdi Torkaman (independent scholar and filmmaker)

“Growing” (2022, 14 minutes) is a short film about bonding, between a parent and a child, who grow together while making a small vegetable garden in the city. This low budget film is made entirely on a smart phone and is an experimental method in urban ecology that aims to invite group reflections on themes such as seasonal sensibility, soil literacy, local belonging, and hope.