Paper short abstract:

Seminars with curators, artists and scholars engaged in geo-cultural movements in the Arctic, forms parts of a cooperation by the Nordic Museum and Stockholm University. This paper is a dialogue on tentacular curation (Haraway 2016) and of making as transdisciplinary process of growth (Ingold 2013)

Paper long abstract:

The largest cultural history museum in Sweden, dating its history to the 1870s, is today in the process of re-expanding and exploring its "Nordic" frames. How can a purified and narrow image of national cultural history give way to perspectives that place the North in, and in relation to, its circumpolar sphere, thus tilting the globe and decentering visitors' engagement? As part of such efforts the museum has joined forces with Stockholm University in a transdisciplinary cooperation held in anticipation of the curation of a planned exhibition in 2019. So far, a two-year-long series of multidisciplinary seminars on the geo-cultural movements in the Arctic, has gathered invited curators, scientist, artists, and scholars from the humanities in exchanges on the making and translation of differing kinds of knowledge.

The seminar methodology takes its inspiration from Tim Ingold's (2013) notion of making as an open and anticipating process of growth and Donna Haraway's (2016) insistence on alliances and tentacular knowledge building. As Mattias Bäckström (2016) recently has argued, the making of an exhibition might be understood as a research process of its own, leaning on the cunning braiding of reflection and material engagements further developed in artistic research.

The presentation will take place as a dialogue on the potentials and problems of the transdisciplinary and tentacular approach. It will be co-presented by Lotten Gustafsson Reinius, in charge of the so called Hallwyl seminar series and the artist-anthropologist Anna Laine, who is one of its active participants and critical friends.