people: Lisa Nyberg

Bring your best walking boots and join us for the Displacement and Hospitality working group meeting this September. We will spend the day both inside and outside, trying out different approaches to Wandering and Walking with presentations by:

Nisrine Boukhari is UmArts Artist Researcher in Residence this autumn. Nisrine is an artist-theorist, who lives in Vienna and Stockholm. In her art-based research projects, she uses language to invoke a distinctive mind’s energy on discovering a new terrain of the imagination implicating the body and mind in an immersive poetic and conceptual experience by using conceptual writing, fragmentation and deconstructed narrative. Her artistic practice emerged from the study of the art walking, and in recent years, she uses the drifting mind as part of her long-term research on the state of Mind-Wandering. This involves investigating the effects of trauma on the human psyche and the use of artistic practice in a therapeutic trajectory on how an artist can create visual/textual environments where viewers experience their own perceptual processing through the art experience. Thus, Boukhari has coined the term Wanderism and as a State of Mind. 

Juanma González is an artist born in Madrid who currently works and resides in Stockholm, where they are a founder of the Flat Octopus artist-run collective, which started in 2019.

“Since the late 1970s, Permaculture has attempted to find creative solutions to the current ecological, energy and social crisis from a critical, intuitive and constructive view. With the subtitle “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, the first principle focuses on an inner exploration of oneself in order to generate a new way of understanding and interpreting our relationship with ourselves and the place where we live; what makes me feel good will also make others feel good, both people and nature. Using walking as an art production method, I created two situations in the form of journeys where participants were actively involved in an exploration to discover nature and the urban environment from a new perspective and to reflect how we relate and react to it.”

Linda Sandström is a social geographer, and Associate Professor with a PhD in Geography. Linda’s research focuses on spaces’ of gendered fear of violence, intersections of race and gender, and planning for safe urban environments.

For more details contact:

UmArts research coordinator Clara West at clara.west@umu.se or

Working group chair Lisa Nyberg at Lisa.nyberg@umu.se

The UmArts Displacement and Hospitality working group brings together researchers from different disciplines exploring the relationships between host and guest in relation to migration and displacement in the north of Sweden.  Several researchers across UmArts are investigating the urgent relations of hospitality and care involved in moving between countries and cities, from the physical process of moving a house, to rethinking Swedish Building standards, and the challenges of addressing issues of migration and the right to work.

In 2022 the ‘Moving North’ project was awarded a New European Bauhaus / ArkDes Vision I Norr fund for developing proposals to increase social integration in the city by exploring forms of reciprocity between migrants, refugees and host communities.  Moving North was a cross-sectoral team consisting of an artist, a curator, architects, a cultural geographer, architecture students and the organization Hej Framling. Based on a strong foothold in northern Sweden and with experience of both collaboration and participant-based methods in places with increased migration and relocation, Moving North critically explored how different placemaking processes can promote social participation and social sustainability. Their findings are recorded in the short film ‘Folketstad: A city of many parts’ 17:40 which address the challenges of restrictive migration and labour laws on people’s well-being at a time when the North is rapidly expanding and recruiting a new workforce.

The Moving North group presented their research at the Transformations 22 Conference ‘Artistic Research in a Time of Change’ at Vetenskapens hus, Luleå University of Technology, 17-18 November 2022; and at the European Conference in Umeå, February 2023.