”Failing to make it better” is a day of talks and action exploring how we can design a future with care and inclusion as key values.

The event focuses on the normative structures at play in civic and cultural life which are built upon established methodologies and traditions. How can we create, encourage and embed a process of meaningful participation that revolves around inclusion and diversity?

The program is planned and organised by ROMs Guest Curator 2023-2024, Aidan Moesby. Contributors are Emma Nilsson, Rector at Bergen School of Architecture; Eva Rowson, Director at Bergen Kjøtt; Outi Salonlahti, Senior Specialist, Accessibility and Communications at Culture for All; Tiril Hasseknippe, artist.

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Contributors:

Aidan Moesby is an artist, curator and writer who explores civic and personal wellbeing through a body of work that is at once playful, intimate, questioning and deeply human. His practice is socially engaged, working extensively within arts and health with a particular interest in the spaces where art, technology and wellbeing intersect. ‘Sagacity – The Periodic Table of Emotions’, a large scale interactive digital installation has been shown at venues from the Wellcome Trust to COP26. As performer and writer Moesby was selected as part of Arts Council England’s International Showcase ‘22, Horizon with his solo show ‘I was Naked, Smelling of Rain’. In 2021 Moesby was the first Disabled Curator in Residence at Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art. A year long professional curatorial development culminating in a public programme and exhibition. Moesby is currently undertaking a practice based PHD. Moesby has worked, exhibited and curated nationally and internationally working with partners such as Dundee Contemporary Arts, The United Nations, Disability Arts Online, The British Council, NUK (NO.), ANAT (AUS), Kulttuuria Kaikille (SUO).

Emma Nilsson is a professor in architecture and rector for Bergen School of Architecture. Author of Arkitekturens kroppslighet. Staden som terräng (thesis) which is a study on parkour and how architecture makes and shapes different bodies and urban body cultures. She has a special interest in how the architecture discipline imagines different bodies and thereby conceptualize different ’users’. Her latest book field; scope; site is the result of an artistic research project investigating how architecture photography can be developed to better capture the roles of architecture as a lived experience, and how photography can be used as part of architectural design processes.

Eva Rowson is an artist, curator and since 2020 Managing Director of Bergen Kjøtt, a production house and cultural venue with more than 100 studio tenants in Bergen´s Skuteviken neighbourhood. Born out of artist-led energy in 2010, Bergen Kjøtt is now owned and operated by the non-profit foundation Stiftelsen Bergen Kjøtt, founded in 2019.  
 
Eva´s curatorial work is rooted in hosting, collaboration and administration – focusing on how different types of work and knowledge are valued, and with what consequences. This research is at the core of projects including "Who's doing the washing up?" a curatorial programme institutional re-imagining at Bergen Kunsthall and Lighthouse Brighton (Norway and UK, 2018-19) and "¿Cómo imaginar una musea?", to conjure up a trans-feminist institution (BAR Project, Barcelona, 2017). Since 2020, Eva has taught the module "Collaborative Practices" on the Fine Arts Masters programme at Fakultet for kunst, musikk og design, University of Bergen.   

Outi Salonlahti works at Culture for All (Finland) for example with communications, equity trainings and accessibility surveys. At the moment she also works in a project called Making space for artistry – equity for disabled artists and artists who are Sign Language users. Outi has studied cultural policy and cultural management, and has also familiarised herself with disability studies. She explored the opportunities of disabled and Deaf artists in her master’s thesis.  

Tiril Hasselknippe is a Stavanger-based artist whose work questions our sense of reality, both as individuals and as a society. Hasselknippe, who has won critical acclaim both nationally and internationally, is specifically known for her developed and intricate treatment of sculpture as material. 

Her work exploration of cosmic questions, alternative and parallel realities - inspired in part by science fiction. In her works, we experience allusions to or slightly distorted imitations of the visual universe we associate with the genre. The size and materiality will sometimes refer to something bodily, such as muscle fibres and nerves, and other times to the needs and caretaking tasks in architecture and infrastructure. Most often the work is some kind of proposal for humankind to find new ways to coexist and underline the importance of the collective. 

A special focus has been given to working with art in public spaces and public art as such, and finding ways for art to exist and communicate outside its usual framework. In recent years she has also been public about her chronic illness, fibromyalgia, and how the symptoms shape and imprint on life and work. 

She currently has an upcoming project Skulpturpunkt in Ekeberg Sculpture Park in Oslo, as well as a solo show at Magenta Plains in New York.

Program

10.00
Welcome
Tea and coffee

10.30
Emma Nilsson
Designing for the Future : Cultural Equity, Inclusion and Climate Change

11.30
Eva Rowson
An institutional perspective on changemaking and care

11.45
Tiril Hasselknippe
How to maintain a sustainable artistic practice and self care

13.00
Outi Salonlahti
International perspective on artists, audiences and institutional working with inclusion and diversity

14.15
Creating a manifesto
– what really needs to change and what are you/we going to commit to.

The seminar will be held in english.

Failing to make it better is a part of UKE 35, read more here.

The event is kindly supported by The Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute, City of Oslo - The Department for Culture and Sport and Sophies Minde Foundation.