Inspiration Day: Learning with Artistic Methods

More detailed information about the agenda items can be found under ”Description to the programme”.

KEYNOTE
09:30-12:00
N1008 IKEA hall

Talk and workshop:
Feral Malmö, Finding the Inland Baltic

PARALLEL SESSION A
11:00-15:00
M-building lobby area

Pitch presentations of Innovation and Design+Change Master students’ ongoing collaborations within the course on Transdisciplinary Design. Student teams supported by designers and researchers from the artist collective Mycket, together with Malmö Stad, are working on the future design of the Malmö Konstmuseet.

12:40-13:00 Guided tour of student projects.
Bring your own packed lunch

PARALLEL SESSION B
13:00-15:00
M-building lobby area
Workshop: Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Robert Duffley, Helene Larsson Pousette. UNGOVERNABLE, Rock it Café

PARALLEL SESSION C
13:00-15:00
M1083 Södra hall
Conducted in Swedish

Talk
13:00–13:30
Malin Eriksson Sjögärd,  Artistic Research from a Children's Literature Perspective

Workshop
13:45–14:45
Kerstin Perski, Everything is Music
Bring your own writing materials. This can be paper and pen or laptops.

PARALLEL SESSION D
Talk
14:00-15:00
M1105
Matilda Plöjel, Expanding stories – a critical bookmaking practice

SYNTHESIS
15:00-15:30
M-building lobby area
Key insights from the day with Christina Zetterlund, Petra Lilja and Lena Håkanson

Finding the Inland Baltic 
Feral Malmö

Coming from Malmö we follow the path of the eel that makes its way from the Öresund, inland through rivers, streams, canals, creeks, sewers, or whatever other possible routes they can find around the many dammed waterways to the lakes and pools of Sweden’s interior. With us we bring a reminder of ecological connections between cities like Växjö and the Öresund and wider Baltic sea, plus some ideas about the need for strong and reparative relationships to the sea in otherwise land-bound environments. 

In this part lecture, part workshop, we will talk about our work with the many different species of Malmö and why much of our research and design is focused on coastal ecology. We will discuss urban ecological conditions in Sweden, both coastally and on land, and the ways they perpetuate the ongoing collapse of marine life and the decline of biodiversity. Following the stories of those species of fish, bird, insect, plant, and more that by migration or other means bring the Baltic sea into Småland. As a participatory workshop we invite participants to learn a bit more about different species that connect Växjö to the sea, and consider how residents of the city might rebuild our long damaged relationships to the beings of the Baltic Sea. 

Rock it Café
UNGOVERNABLE

Join the artists of UNGOVERNABLE for a workshop at the intersection of performance and democratic movement-building. The project team will facilitate an embodied exploration of devised theater methods and a conversation on the links between creativity and civic action.

UNGOVERNABLE is a research/performance project bridging diplomacy, archives, and contemporary activism. The work grows from an intergenerational encounter between two women: American artist Caitlin Nasema Cassidy and former Swedish diplomat Helene  Larsson Pousette. Motivated by the interconnected challenges facing democracy and the environment on both sides of the Atlantic, Caitlin and Helene are moving together through the archives, illuminating feminist troublemakers and other political ancestors whose legacies speak directly to present struggles—including Elin Wägner, Rachel Carson, and more. This investigation will culminate in a new play weaving archival material with autobiographical performance and strategies for collective action, developed with dramaturg Robert Duffley.

Created through residencies in Sweden and the US in 2025 and 2026, the work will tour internationally in 2027.

With this Rock it Café, we aim to create an open meeting place where artists, researchers, and citizens can connect, share knowledge, and explore opportunities for collaboration.

These informal yet structured gatherings offer a space to exchange ideas and imagine new ways of working together. Rock it Café is part of the Erasmus+ project Rock Your Research, coordinated by Linnaeus University.

Artistic Research from a Children's Literature Perspective
Malin Eriksson Sjögärd

Departing from research questions that have emerged from the intersection between children's book writing and students' texts, I will discuss how the teaching situation requires me to verbalise my often silent authorial knowledge, which in turn raises new questions and reflections on my own practice. I will also briefly present my two other research projects: how my norm-critical interest has influenced the artistic freedom in some of my writing processes and how I bridge the gap between adults and children in my writing.  

Everything is music
Kerstin Perski in collaboration with music students

Try writing music!
Everything has music in it. Even silence.
Music is not always in what you hear. Often it is behind and in between.
In the rhythm, tempo and dynamics of phenomena.
In their movement.
In their emotional tone.
By becoming aware of this in texts and by starting to ‘listen’ to them, both those of others and your own, you can also start to write more musically and ‘physically’, or to put it another way: closer to what you want to express.

Expanding stories – a critical bookmaking practice
Matilda Plöjel
My artistic research aims to make visible and share knowledge that stems from my critical book making practice, which focuses on expanding stories through their materialization.
This process of research, collaborations and experimentation does not only give shape to a content but also add layers of meaning. In my talk I will use the book field; scope; site (Sailor Press, 2021) as a case study and give examples of how I use the learnings in my teaching.    
https://sailorpress.com/field-scope-site
https://portal.research.lu.se/en/publications/field-scope-site-field-scope-and-site

Feral Malmö is a design studio organizing creative workshops about ecology in city life. Working with plants, animals, oceans, fungi, and more as storytellers, we use participatory learning, publishing, and craft to practice better ways of living with nonhuman nature, to clarify the severity of our manufactured ecological crisis and to form reconstructive relationships with our shared ecosystem. 

UNGOVERNABLE is a collaboration between Swedish and American artists and academic/cultural institutions. The project is co-created by New York-based theater artists Caitlin Nasema Cassidy and Robert Duffley alongside Helene Larsson Pousette, who served as Counsellor for Cultural Affairs at Sweden’s embassies in Washington, DC and Serbia. They collaborated previously on We Hear You—A Climate Archive, a global storytelling project exploring youth perspectives on the climate emergency, with performances at the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden (77 meddelanden till framtiden), the Kennedy Center, and the Hirshhorn Museum, as well as United Nations conferences COP27 (Egypt), COP28 (UAE), and Stockholm+50. Published at aclimatearchive.com, the stories are entering the permanent collection of Stockholms Stadsarkivet in 2025.

Malin Eriksson Sjögärd is a children's book author and has written around thirty children's novels, beginner's books and easy-to-read books. She also writes comic strips for the magazine Min Häst. Since 2021, she has been an artistic lecturer in Creative Writing and teaches those who write for children and young people. 

Kerstin Perski is a playwright, librettist and author who has written around thirty plays and musical dramas, as well as poems that have been set to music, for adults, children and young people. Recently, she has been writing more and more prose and has published two novels and a collection of short stories. A recurring theme in her writing, regardless of genre, is the musicality of the text. She has also devoted herself to artistic research and received her doctorate in 2020 from the Stockholm University of the Arts with the thesis Levandegörandets poetik (The Poetics of Bringing to Life). In Search of the Music Drama Gränsland and the Transformation of Drama through Text, Vocal and Instrumental Performance. Since 2024, she has been a professor of creative writing at Linnaeus University.

Matilda Plöjel is a graphic designer focusing on book design, 2010 she founded the independent micro publishing platform Sailor Press. Since 2017 Matilda is teaching as a senior lecturer at Visual Communication + Change, Design Department, LNU. 

Collaborator (will not be part of the talk):
Emma Nilsson: since 2021 rector and general manager of BAS (Bergen School of Architecture). Emma comes from a position as assistant program manager at Lund University, Sweden. She has a master’s and doctorate in architecture from Lund University, has worked as a practicing architect and has been employed as a researcher, lecturer and program manager at both Malmö and Lund University.

field; scope; site is part of the artistic research project TELE SCOPE with support from Swedish Research Council, Stockholm. The book received a Svensk Bokkonst nomination,2021, and was one of the winners of Best Swedish Photobook of the Year 2023.

field; scope; site, Emma Nilsson. Lunds University. Publisher: Sailor Press, 2021, ISBN 9789198624441.