PARSE - Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

Hem
Sverige
Gothenburg
PARSE - Platform for Artistic Research Sweden

PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference.

PARSE is an international artistic research publishing platform and biennial conference based in the Artistic Faculty at University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Its purpose is to bring interdisciplinary art practices and researchers from across disciplines into dialogue through shared enquiry.

07/09/2026

Plural Ecologies

Study group facilitated by Ram Krishna Ranjan
First meeting (online) Friday 11 Sept. 15:00 CEST

The Anthropocene has emerged as a widely circulated and influential conceptual framework for understanding planetary ecological crisis, yet its universalising invocation of a generic “human” often obscures the uneven histories and responsibilities underpinning that crisis. This lab is a transdisciplinary space for investigating how marginalised communities—differentiated by race, caste, class, gender, colonial histories, and Global South positionality—navigate ecological crisis while resisting, or simply bypassing, universalising frameworks like the Anthropocene. Building on this central question, the lab is further invested in exploring whether posthumanist and decolonial positions conflict irreconcilably, or whether marginalised communities generate alternative ontologies and epistemologies that transcend this theoretical impasse. How do Indigenous cosmologies, Black ecological thought, and Third World environmental movements already articulate human/more-than-human relationships that bypass these tensions?

Work will unfold through reading groups, film screenings, round-table discussions, and workshops convening artists and scholars across disciplines and geographies, alongside focused discussion on grassroots ecological practices that are too often rendered invisible within mainstream discourse on ecology.

In the first phase of the lab (Autumn 2026), the focus will be on mapping and broadening the understanding of these questions, envisaged through a reading group and a series of film screenings.

The first meeting for those interested in joining the reading group will introduce a list of possible books and films that can serve as the basis for this work. However, depending on the outcome of this first meeting, the list is open to change; the exact schedule, along with the films for screening and meetings for the reading group, will be announced afterward. Those interested in the reading group are welcome to join a Zoom meeting on the 11th of September at 15:00 (Central European Time).

For more info visit https://parsejournal.com/event/plural-ecologies/

image: Ram Krishna Ramjan, Fourth World (still), 2023. Digital Video, 67:00 minutes.

27/07/2026

Future issue announcement:

Tourist Traps
Issue #27
Spring 2028

Editors: Fabiola Fiocco and Alessandra Saviotti

Tourist Traps examines the entanglement of holidays, beauty, and image production as a central device in the organisation of society and the construction of mythologies designed to define hierarchies and forms of extraction and exploitation. Drawing on aesthetic theory, cultural studies and the anthropology of tourism, the issue approaches the idea of holidays, ranging from leisure to adventure and departure, in its historically gendered, classed and racialised articulations. From bourgeois leisure to state-organised holidays, vacation has long operated as a fundamental social ritual. With the Industrial Revolution and the progressive democratisation of train travel, it came to enable and regulate forms of socialisation, rest, and consumption, eventually taking its most pervasive form in contemporary tourism. Being a privileged site where desire, status and imagination converge, travelling is framed as a contested field embedded within the logics of advanced capitalism, where aesthetic experience is increasingly commodified, standardised, and unevenly distributed. The ‘tourist gaze’ is considered here as a socially structured way of seeing, and it reveals how aesthetic experience is stratified along class lines, producing divergent relationships to authenticity, landscape and cultural difference. Central to the issue is the relationship between political economy and aesthetic experience, where travel becomes a manifestation of “how work and leisure are organised as separate and regulated spheres of social practice in ‘modern’ societies” (Urry and Larsen, 2011). Holidays, in this sense, operate as a political infrastructure that governs who can inhabit and imagine the world.

Fabiola Fiocco and Alessandra Saviotti are curators and researchers whose practices converge around socially engaged art, infrastructural critique, and collaborative methodologies.

Visit https://parsejournal.com/research-themes/ to reach all our current research themes.

20/07/2026

Future Issue announcement:

Cleaning
Issue #26
Autumn 2027

Editors: Lisa Crossman and Ludmila Ferrari

In 2024, nibia pastrana santiago turned the Mead Art Museum’s freight elevator into a stage. Dressed in bright shorts, a sheer tank top and sunglasses—an outfit that nods to expectations of Caribbean fashion—she cleaned. Or rather: she performed cleaning. Moving to the cadence of salsa vieja, she engaged objects in a sequence of erratic, deliberately lazy, and erotic gestures. No task was completed. Her actions refused resolution, suspending cleaning between labor and choreography, function and excess.

The scene recalls Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s enduring provocation: how should the house of the muses be cleaned, and by whom? Both Ukeles and pastrana render visible forms of labor historically obscured and devalued through racialized, gendered, and neo-colonial frameworks. Yet while Ukeles labored, sweeping floors, dusting walls, hand-brushing museum stairs, pastrana’s gestures carefully stopped short of becoming labor. The distinction marks the distance between maintenance as duty and cleaning as provocation.

Cleaning exceeds maintenance. It operates simultaneously as a material task, meditative practice and political metaphor. “Cleaning” has been mobilized to justify forced deportation, censorship, and historical erasure, even as maintenance work remains essential to social, institutional, and ecological systems. To clean is to sustain, but also to erase. The same gesture that preserves can expunge; the same logic that orders can eliminate.

This issue takes “cleaning” as a site of tension: a field of material, symbolic, and political operations. What distinctions are produced between cleanliness and dirtiness, and who enforces them? What forms of life are maintained, and which are discarded? If maintenance is an endless Sisyphean task often realized by women and racialized groups, under what conditions does cleaning become empowering or belittling, violent or meditative?

Lisa Crossman, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, USA,

Ludmila Ferrari, Assistant Professor of Spanish (Architectural Studies and Latin American Studies), Amherst, MA, USA,

Visit https://parsejournal.com/research-themes/ to reach all our current research themes.

13/07/2026

Future Issue announcement:

Territories
Issue #25
Spring 2027

Editors: Paola Fabres and Sofía Steinvorth

What happens when artistic practices cease to approach territory as an object of observation, a backdrop, or an iconographic theme, and instead operate as forms of support, listening, research, and local organization within specific contexts? Taking this premise as a starting point, the proposed issue brings together artistic practices that treat territories not as an image, but as an active field of relations, conflict and local knowledges in a present marked by profound geopolitical and ecological crises. Rather than merely thematizing landscapes or communities, the works assembled here operate through an infrastructural understanding of territory. Infrastructure, in this sense, refers not only to material support but to a systemic engagement with the surrounding context, including relations between ecology, economy, modes of production, social organization and cultural practices. The proposal draws on Chilean theorist Justo Pastor Mellado’s distinction between service-oriented and infrastructural artistic practices, privileging works that do not simply circulate within the art system but produce durable conditions for research, memory, local articulation, and knowledge production.

Across mountainous borderlands, river basins, agricultural plains, urban centres and rural peripheries, the issue brings together contributions with a diversity of editorial formats emerging from distinct territorial settings. They include proposals attentive to Andean cosmotechnics at the borderlands of Chile; investigations into the Río Bravo as a site of geopolitical dispute and territorial imagination at the Mexico-US border; experimental visual explorations of informal commerce routes between the Caspian and Persian littorals; process-based research on water systems, local cosmologies, and socio-cultural ecologies in the plains of Chengdu; field-based approaches to the relations between agriculture and ecological vulnerability in the Mira river basin in Portugal; and experiences linked to rurality, food systems, cooperation, and local knowledges in the Serra da Mantiqueira in Brazil. These are joined by practices concerned with biocultural heritage, living archives, and decentralized forms of rural learning and collective organization.

Paola Fabres / Post-doctoral researcher at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and visiting researcher at Universidade Federal do ABC. Lives and works between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

Sofía Steinvorth / PhD researcher at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Universidade de São Paulo (USP) / Lives and works between Lisbon and São Paulo.

Visit https://parsejournal.com/research-themes/ to reach all our current research themes.

06/07/2026

Featured articles for July 2026, chosen by Klara Björk, senior lecturer in Film and head of department at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg.
⁠
FilmED is an EU-funded (Erasmus+) collaboration with film programmes at the Film Academy in The Netherlands and Łódź Film School in Poland. https://filmededitorialchannel.substack.com

As part of our workshop in June 2026, we invited colleagues to the forests and land of Halland. We worked with the concept and method of foraging’ to explore its impact on rethinking film practice. Taking our cue from Ursula K. Le Guin’s text “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, we explored other ways of working; to train our sensorial and perceptual responses as filmmakers, to use the camera to collect visual material and to select and present the experience of foraging through film practice. Acknowledging entangled interspecies relations in nature, this is a selection of articles inspired by the days from around this summer solstice.

In addition to the compilation, I would recommend a deep dive into Issue 23: Fabulation which invites reconsideration to include fabulation in the carrier bag theory of fiction.

Visit parsejournal.com to reach the articles⁠.

01/07/2026

Fabulating in Echoes
Emily Orley

An experiment in fabulation that is, at once, an inquiry into what fabulation itself can mean when form and argument are inseparable.

The piece comprises nineteen fragments, presented in a sequence that changes with each reading. Woven around the Greek myth of Echo, it draws on creative criticism, post-criticism, écriture féminine, and diffractive reading — treating these not merely as methodological tools, but as modes of thinking through and alongside the work itself.

The result is an open, possibilities-rich text that resists resolution. No conclusions are offered — only openings.

Keywords: echo, fabulation, diffraction, fragment, ethical invention, circle, Greek mythology

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/fabulating-in-echoes/ to view the article in full

30/06/2026

The Fairy Tale’s Tail: Some Writing and Reading Scores for a Critical Actualisation of the Mythological Mélusine

Regina Dürig and Wiebke Leister

Don't, don't — don't ever look at her.

Mélusine can be married, spoken to, shared a bed with — but never looked at. Not on that day of the week when her secret tail appears. And yet, inevitably, she is looked at. And so she leaves. Half-snake, half-human, exiled. Obstructed in her stride, forced into hiding. Forever after.

But where does "life" end and where did "wife" begin?

A new chapter revisits Mélusine's story with her hyphenated body at its centre — celebrating the twists and turns of her tale not as burden but as a source of power. Drawing on fabulation, the work connects reader and writer alike to Mélusine's lineage of multi-creatured mythical possibility, asking what she might do today to prevent trauma and tragedy, and how she might grow scales over scars.

Keywords: Mélusine, snake-woman, hybrid body, medieval legend, broken promise, text and image, adaptations, transpositions, female agency, writing and reading scores.

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/the-fairy-tales-tail/
to read the text in full⁠

Images by Bernhard Richel (c. 1473–74) for a print version of the German adaptation by Thüring von Ringoltingen (1456)[1]

29/06/2026

Enargeia: Performance Lecture: ‘I hold it to my ear. I hold it in my hand’
Edith Marie Pasquier

Drawing from the impetus of the exhibition “Enargeia”, Edith Marie Pasquier provides a transcription of her performance at the Fabulation workshop to connect human experiences of loss, grief and death by proposing a fabulation of feeling - a sense of belonging and oneness with experiences in and from nature.

Key words: fabulation, energeia, grief, death, feeling, loss, multi-species encounter, indigenous knowledge, ecologies, poetic evidence.

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/enargeia/ to read the text in full

image: Edith Marie Pasquier, Bronze Wings (for Zoetrope) Casting, 2019, Umeå, Sweden, C-type handprint

28/06/2026

Traumatic Objects: Interspecies Fabulatory Practice
Nicky Coutts

What can be said or made in the face of overwhelm brought on by the climate crisis? This essay explores fabulation as both a conceptual and material practice within contemporary fine art, not as a fictional departure from reality, but, drawing on Donna Haraway, as a situated, collective practice of "worlding" that composes relations between human and more-than-human bodies.

Central to the essay is the drawing series Traumatic Objects, developed through bodily rehearsal of the gestures of Koko, the gorilla known for her use of American Sign Language. Here, drawing becomes a form of thinking-through-making in which meaning emerges relationally rather than representationally.

Brought into dialogue with J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, Roger Caillois' "legendary psychasthenia", and Meister Eckhart's theology of attraction, fabulation emerges as a critical method for sustaining relationality within a fractured ecological present, one that does not resolve crisis, but remains with its complexities through ongoing acts of making.

Keywords: fabulation, language, creative practice research, interspecies, mimesis, drawing, painting, attraction, worlding, ‘planetary feeling’, grief.

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/traumatic-objects/ to read the text in full⁠

image: Nicky Coutts, Traumatic Objects 3, 2022–26, from a series of four pen and paint pen drawings on fabriano paper, 200 x 150 cm

27/06/2026

Stitching Raby Diop's Presence: A Narrative Woven and Dyed in Fabric
Pierre-Antoinne Vettorello

This article centres on Raby Diop, a Wolof woman from Rufisque, Senegal, who travelled to Paris in January 1939 at the age of 29. One of the very few African women in the city at the time, she refused to assimilate, insisting on wearing her Senegalese clothing rather than adopting European dress.

Drawing on family archives and photographs, the essay imagines the twenty days before Raby's voyage from Dakar to Paris aboard the Medie II. Alongside this written and visual reconstruction, the garment she wore during her layover in Casablanca has been reproduced in collaboration with Binta Gaye and Maï Diop at Atelier Tesss in Saint-Louis, Senegal, using traditional indigo stitch-resist dyeing techniques.

At a moment when France continues to grapple with its colonial history, this work brings forward the voices of African women whose presence in Paris has long been overlooked, recovering a hidden chapter of Afropean history through textile, image, and radical kinship.

Keywords: critical fabulation, potential history, radical kinship, Afropea, stitch-resist dyeing, Indigo, Raby Diop, Senegal

Visit https://parsejournal.com/article/stitching-raby-diops-presence/ to read the text in full

image: Galandou Diouf and Raby Diop in Paris, Excelsior, 1939

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