Climate Histories Art Interventions at ESEH 2025

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The theme for the upcoming European Society for Environmental History Conference (ESEH 2025) to be held August 18th – 22nd in Uppsala, Sweden is Climate Histories. Coinciding with the conference, the Local Organizing Committee has curated a 3 day program of artistic events, creative workshops, and art interventions. One aim of the conference is to explore how academia and the arts can collaborate to investigate environmental experiences. We have incorporated many creative activities into the schedule – for instance a sound art workshop and a poetry workshop – in order to encourage attendees to consider how artistic methods, sensory stimuli, and bodily presence can be used to assist in environmental history research. In the Climate Histories Art Interventions event, the focus is on exploring the contemporary and historical experiences of living with climate changes. The art interventions program is an open format, inviting the general public to participate in the theme of the conference in the evenings. The art interventions are also available to those that register for online attendance at the conference.

With generous support in funding from Future Earth and Nordic Culture Fund, we were able to fund two long term artists to engage with the Climate Histories theme. We also hosted an open call where we selected seven additional artists to fund to enact art interventions that will be performed, exhibited, and activated during the conference. Finally we have funded three video artists for an on-site and virtual video room of their works.

Two of the art interventions invite open participation in their projects. Regardless of attendance at ESEH 2025, you are warmly welcomed to participate in archiving and exploring climate history and memory in these two projects. More information on all projects follows below.

Contribute to Losing Winter
Contribute to lemóni lemon lymun citron

”Oki Naganode’ by Julia Lohmann is a large-scale installation at the Victoria and Albert Museum made of Japanese Naga seaweed. Photograph by Petr Krejci.

Long Term Artists

Julia Lohmann

Julia Lohmann investigates and critiques the ethical and material value systems underpinning our relationship with flora and fauna. She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Design at Aalto University, Helsinki, where she also lives. As designer in residence at the V&A in 2013, she founded the Department of Seaweed, an interdisciplinary community of practice exploring the sustainable development of seaweed as a design material. At the conference she will host an open workshop inviting the public to explore working creatively with algae.

Signe Johannessen

Solastalgia Pangolin
Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören as the duo Rören/Johannessen

The artists will reside inside Solastalgia Pangoline during the conference, starting up a long timeline of visits and stays for years to come.  They will host a inaughuration celebration in and around the sculptural structure in the park, with a daily programme built by open workshops about trans-generational knowledge, experimental eternity dining experiences, collective labour festivities and readings from the inhouse library. All to get her on her feet and able to carry out her agency into the unforeseen futures ahead.

From the ground, a vaulted figure. Through the centuries, a vessel. In place and in motion, a field hospital on the front lines of the climate crisis. A simple cabin or capsule, but at the same time a complex sculptural base station with ramifications in time and space. Solastalgia Pangolin is a temporary home for artistic refinement and contemplation regarding the state of the biosphere that is our eternal home.

Signe Johannessens practice and what she does in collaboration with Erik Rören, is done with a modus operandi dealing with the power structures at play when existing in this particular time and planetary order. The birthing of the large social sculpture, shelter and agent Solastalgia Pangolin in the English Park in Uppsala August 19th -21st is a response and a contribution to the overall theme and aim of the conference. This exact time in history marks the start of an epic project that aims to survive us all and live and work throughout generations for at least 500 years, through inter-generational practice.

λεμόνι lemon ليمون citron (lemóni lemon lymun citron) by C. Grace Chang is a sound-based work exploring the connection between food, place, and memory. Photographs by Orestis Seferoglou.

Art Interventions

C. Grace Chang

My audio installation λεμόνι lemon ليمون citron (lemóni lemon lymun citron) archives lost places through memory and taste. Though we may lose places to climate change, war, migration, or time, they live on in our stories. In recorded interviews, regenerative farmers in Evia, Greece give recollections in their preferred languages over bowls of local produce. You’re invited to listen, eat, and remember/resurrect your own lost places. Participants are welcome to submit their memories through the project website.

Anna Pehrsson

How might imagination and poetics make sense of the relationship between the Human and the Earth at a moment of ecological crisis? The project Mountainbuilding learns from geological processes in order to produce movements within bodies and environment – activations and imaginaries that come together as speculations for change.

elieli

Heavy Metal Clouds is a performative lecture and guided meditation exploring the entanglements of minerals, toxicity, memory, and digital technology. Drawing from field notes at a toxic lake in Inner Mongolia, it considers the digital sphere as a haunted, spectral entity—shaped by extraction and environmental violence.

James Webb

There’s No Place Called Home is a recurring, worldwide intervention in which audio recordings of specific foreign bird calls are broadcast from speakers concealed in local trees. As bird vocalisations are generally employed to mark territory and attract mates, the thematics of this artwork key into issues of power, freedom, hospitality, and migration. Started in 2004, over 60 versions of this intervention have been undertaken on 6 continents.

Eliza Evans

Hellfire Holdings is a satirical, participatory artwork structured as a legal fund for communities directly impacted by fossil fuel extraction, presented through the form of a temporary Investor Relations Office. It mobilizes collective investment to support high-stakes environmental lawsuits brought by communities harmed by fossil fuel development.

Lynn Cazabon

For the ESEH Climate Histories Art Interventions, she will activate a unique version of her ongoing project Losing Winter, a participatory artwork and archive of memories and emotions about winter, revealing the personal and cultural ties we have to the season and reflecting upon what we are collectively losing due to climate change impacts on seasonal patterns. Losing Winter is a site-specific project intended to be realized in different locations around the world. She would like to invite the public and ESEH conference attendees to become part of the project by contributing a memory about winter from their past. Please visit the Losing Winter installation to record your memory and to experience memories contributed by people in other locations.

Niklas Wallenborg

Climate Time Capsule is a web-based participatory artwork and archive. Where private reflections on climate change are sealed until August 22, 2050.— With this work I explore our relationship with time, the boundary between private and public, and how language, collective memory, and climate narratives evolve over time.

“Utopia Now!” by Niklas Wallenborg

Additional Information

You can view the art intervention schedule here and to see the full conference schedule, you can login to the conference portal. More information about the art interventions can be found on the conference art interventions page.
We invite you to participate both through the two interactive projects and through online attendance.

Any questions can be sent to Nicole Miller: art@eseh2025.com

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Nicole Miller

Nicole Miller is an artist and visual anthropologist based in Sweden working at the intersection of art, philosophy, and environmental history. She works at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Uppsala University. She was Conference Manager for ESEH 2025 and Curator for the coinciding Climate Histories Art Interventions.

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