Researcher talk: Architect Toms Kokins on his research project Sweden's Timber Empire, in conversation with museum curator Anca Rujoiu.
Toms Kokins’s research explores ecologic and cultural implications of Swedish forestry expansion outside Sweden’s national borders. In this conversation, Kokins will draw on interviews he conducted in Latvia and foreground the voices of those impacted by the forestry industry. A fabric of voices — from forest workers, activists, and loggers to forestry company representatives, will provide nuanced perspectives and first-hand experiences of this lived reality.
Kokins is one of the participants in the exhibition Eight Degrees / Contemporary Art on the Forest.
Language English
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Eight Degrees / Contemporary Art on the Forest brings together contemporary art exploring our complex relationship with the forest, ranging from ideas of an inviolable intrinsic value to the conception of something to be utilised, such as an economic asset or a space for recreation. What is a forest? And what pressing questions about it are relevant here and now?
Through photography, film, sculpture, drawing, textiles, sound, and installations, the artists invite us to reflect on the forest, observed and depicted from various perspectives and with diverse experiences. Their works provoke questions about tradition and future, forestry practices, land conflicts, biological diversity, and the forest as a sacred space.
The exhibition title Eight degrees references Jörgen Stenberg’s eponymous poem.
