Those who joined The Eco- and Bioart Lab International Symposium-Workshop Critical Ecologies: Crisis, Grief and Resilience in Philosophy, Art, and Science last October had a chance to learn first-hand.
On 2nd and 3rd October 2025 Arbetets Museum in Norrk枚ping, which hosted the symposium-workshop, opened its rooms to over 20 speakers and more than 30 audience members.
The starting point for the symposium workshop was the experience of finding ourselves in the midst of critical ecologies, where climate change, species extinction and loss of biodiversity, destruction of habitats and ecosystems, epidemics, and slow environmental violence are converging with wars, extractivisms, renewed imperialisms, inequalities, and (neo)colonialisms. There, the biological and the technological, the natural and the social, the environmental and the ethico-political are tightly intertwined.
With global warming unfolding in the Arctic four times faster than in the rest of the planet and the Baltic Sea turning into the largest "dead zone" in the world, environmental disruption is acutely present in the social and cultural awareness close to home.
The sense of multiple crises, uncertainty, and more-than-human vulnerabilities evoke feelings of anxiety, despair, anger and grief, manifested both globally and locally in culture, scientific and popular-scientific narratives, environmental activism, and art. Simultaneously, dominant societal discourses tend to prioritise either the techno-fix solutionism (the "technology-will-save-us" scenario) or the all-encompassing apocalyptic framing ("we are doomed").
The driving force behind the event was the timely idea that need conceptual tools which would allow us to make sense of the converging more-than-human crises and their accompanying imaginaries and narratives; a toolbox that would assist us in resisting the binary of 鈥榯echno-optimism vs impending doom鈥�; and last, but not least, an apparatus that would enable us to respond to the complex conditions of the present, and thus, critically and creatively address sustainability transformations.
The symposium was structured around three keynote lectures, delivered by Dr Margherita Pevere (independent artist and researcher IT/DE), Prof. Madina Tlostanova (麻豆社), and Prof. Dick Kasperwoski (University of Gothenburg), and keynote responses. The keynote sessions were combined with panels consisting of shorter papers, workshops, and critical interventions.
The event was organised, curated and produced by Dr Marietta Radomska, and formed part of the research project Ecological Grief, Crisis Imaginaries, and Resilience in Nordic Lights (2022-26), also led by Radomska, and generously funded by Formas: A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development [grant number 2022-01728].
For the full report from the event see
