people: Edith Marie Pasquier

The UmArts Summer Exhibition 2025 celebrates our new Small Visionary Projects in art, architecture, design, sloyd and music. Researchers will present their practice-based work-in-progress investigating issues of sustainability and resilience at different scales. 

This summer we will present several new projects in the UmArts Research Studio including: Little things by Robin Durant; Enargeia by Edith Marie Pasquier; Maker Utopias by Cindy Kohtala, Magnus Wink, Rickard Åström and Sara Rylander; Pushing the Limits of Craft by Sara Rylander; and In-between the lines: an exploration of the street as a place of cultural negotiation by Richard Conway & Sangram Shirke. Architectural experiments around the UmArts Studio building will feature Healing the Wounds by Constanze Hirt; Tooling Ice and Sawdust by Elena Vazquez & Julio Diarte. Throughout the opening day there will be performances including Carla Colleveccio’s Performative Bodies; Göran Wretling’s investigation into AI as a Collaborative Partner in Music; and Edith Marie Pasquier´s Songs for the Slain Birds and Children- 2023 – 2025.

The UmArts Small Visionary Research Projects (SVP) provide seed funding to support research active staff to try out new ideas with big ambitions that contribute to the UmArts research community across the Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå School of Architecture, Department of Creative Studies in Education and Bildmuseet. 

Open 11 June to 18 June 12.00-16.00

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Opening Program 11 June 14.00-19.00

14.00-14.10 Opening Summer Exhibition: Welcome by Director Ele Carpenter and Thomas Wågberg, incoming Dean of the Faculty of Technical Science.

14.10-14.30 Performance by Edith Marie Pasquier 

14.30-15.00 Presentations by Robin Durand, Cindy Kohtala, Sara Rylander, Richard Conway

16.00-16.30 Performance Carla Collevechio, Black Box, Curiosum

17.00-17.20 Presentations by Elena Vazquez & Julio Diarte, Constanze Hirt

18.00 Musical performance by Göran Wretling

Edith Marie Pasquier, Enargeia, Västerbottens Museum Umeå, 17 November 2024 – 13 April 2025

The exhibition is a collaboration between Edith Marie Pasquier, Robin Durand architect and Tryggve Lundberg, sculptor, to create the exhibition Enargeia at the Västerbottens Museum, supported by a Small Visionary Project.

Enargeia (or bright unbearable reality) was the phrase that the ancients used to describe the aura of the classical work of war – the Iliad. It refers to the Iliad’s vocative power, to when the gods came down to earth from heaven, as they were, in their truest expression in beauty or in terror. The research and artistic project explore how humans and other living beings are affected and interconnected in the experience of sudden grief and is situated within the existing discourses of grief, politics and multi-species thinking within the contemporary arts. It unravels the known and existing discourse / histories of image making to excavate and propose alternative frames rooted in the poetics and politics of the present condition.

Working with the tools of chemical analogue photography and the notion of the ‘live’ encounter in contemporary art practice, Edith Marie Pasquier’s work uses early cinematic techniques, photographic process, sculptural assemblages, and sonic propositions to propose ‘live’ encounters that are activated by others both individually and collectively. The project questions the presence of the dead in the life of the living and open how grief resides within, around and through images.

The architectural models for the exhibition were shown at UmArts as part of the Hurricanes and Scaffolding Symposium 4-6 December 2024. Architect Robin Durand has created circular like structures which amplify the relationship between still and moving images, sculpture and sound and enables the visitors to follow their own paths through the artworks.

The exhibition includes a series of performances, readings and events. Follow the Västerbottens Museum for details.

The Geopolitics of the Forest working group meets regularly to share their research on the geopolitics of the forest across art, architecture, political science and landscape ecology. The group are exploring how to develop holistic and interdisciplinary understandings of the human / forest relationship that can represent multiple, overlapping and conflicting interests. They aim to develop a shared critical space for new collaborative artistic research projects which deal with the ethical complexities of forestry in relation to the climate crisis, to reconsider the language and aesthetics of sustainability.

The meetings investigate multidisciplinary approaches to the human and nonhuman entanglements of the forest in Northern Sweden. Research questions investigate the ethical aesthetics of different kinds of woodlands and their material and geopolitical networks.

The Geopolitics of the Forest Working Group is chaired by Luis Berrios-Negron, UmArts Research Fellow in Art and Architecture. Members include: Gerd Aurell, artist; James B. Brown, architect; Sofia Johansson, curator; Toms Kokins, architect; Lars Östlund, forest historian; Edith Marie Pasquier, artist; Janina Priebe, political science; Moa Sandström, Sámi studies; Per Sandström, landscape ecologist, and many others who come to share their research, practices and ideas.