The Cultural University
The Cultural University is a platform for arts and culture that encourages interdisciplinary collaborations through critical and creative dialogues and cultural experiences. Its primary mission is to enhance the interaction between culture and the university’s core activities in research, education, and collaboration.
Image above: The exhibition “Arctic – Stories from the Edge of the Ice” will be on display at Linnaeus University in Växjö and Kalmar from 26 November 2025 to 7 June 2026. “Metalley” Ida Rödén, 2023.
Linnaeus Recidency Programme
Each year, Linnaeus University extends an invitation to nationally and internationally active artists across various art forms to engage in interdisciplinary collaborations with university researchers through the Linnaeus Residency Programme. The complex and interconnected challenges of our time serve as the foundation for the questions, themes, and methodologies explored within the residency. Through mutual exploration and dialogue between diverse knowledge cultures, researchers and artists gain opportunities for unexpected perspectives that can foster cross-fertilisation, visibility, and change.
The Linnaeus Residency Programme focuses on fostering interactions and collaborations between artists and the fields of research and education. Spanning 4-8 weeks throughout the year, the programme allows for personalized work and project development.
We both announce and invite participation, offering a fee, travel expenses, accommodation, workspace, production funds, and process support. Participants benefit from mentoring, public interactions, and presentations, including a process/sketch exhibition at the university.
Residency participants are welcomed into a diverse community of researchers, students, teachers, cultural practitioners, and community developers within the university and partner organizations, both in Småland and across the nation.
Current Artist in Residence
Brandon LaBelle (US)
Linnaeus Residency Programme, May 2025 - May 2026
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, resulting in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives.
As an artist in residence at the Cultural University, Linnaeus University, Brandon will be running a public seminar series under the title The Pirate Academyaddressing the topic of Poetic Knowledge.
With the establishment of artistic, practice-based research methods, art is increasingly understood as a form of knowledge production. As Tom Holert highlights, art today is predominantly viewed as “epistemic activity.” Such a development follows from the prevailing logic underpinning the global knowledge economy and the ways in which information and data function as new forms of power and currency. This seems to invite a number of questions, such as: What do we mean by knowledge production and in what way does a logic of production lead to particular ways of knowing? If art is largely a gesture of epistemic activity, what kind of knowledge does it make possible? And how might artistic methods contribute to movements of epistemic agency and the ongoing need for decolonizing knowledge practices?
Art and Science collaborations in the area of streght - The Core of Welfare
During his residency Brandon LaBelle will lead a workshop on The Listening Effect in collaboration with researchers in Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Sustainable Health as a part of the Rock Your Research Project, inviting to knowledge exchange between artists, researchers, and citizens. Workshops with students in the Nursing programme are being planned for the spring 2026.
Biography
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial and Listening Academy. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of artistic presentations and extra-institutional initiatives, including Communities in Movement (2019-23), Oficina de Autonomia (2017-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995 he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include Poetics of Listening (2025), Dreamtime X (2022), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Read more about the residency and Brandon Labelle here.
Culture at Linnaeus University
We work to make Linnaeus University a university where culture is present. This can be achieved in many different ways. You will encounter art wherever you go, both indoors and outdoors. You can also be invited to lunch concerts, theatre performances, or exhibitions.
Pieces of art are located both inside and outside the university buildings. Art outside the buildings is always available to the public and those inside the buildings can be easily accessed by during office hours. Several performances are also open to the public in connection with various academic celebrations.
Art and science
When art and science meet, exciting things happen. A dissertation can be illustrated through dancing. A researcher and a director can jointly produce a performance lecture. Artists and researchers can meet in an exhibition or a workshop. A researcher’s results can be made into an art installation. Scientific findings can enhance the experience at a concert.
