Exhibitions & projects
In the project Naturkulturreservatet Marhult, artists, researchers, and other participants are invited to engage with the illegal waste dump at Marhult (Uppvidinge). The dump is one of the 26,000 risk-classified contaminated sites in Sweden that, according to the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency, poses a significant risk to humans and the environment. These places can be described as final and closed locations: after production or catastrophe, beyond responsibility and outside the public eye. The short-sightedness of consumer culture meets the slowness of nature and the eternity of waste in a crisis-laden age after humanity.
The debated waste landfill at Marhult carries a concentrated critical mass: it narrates in a mixed and unseparated manner the precarious relationships between humans and the environment, it constitutes a material memory bank and ecologically unknown terrain. Marhult leaves behind a complex nature-culture heritage – remnants of culture that adversely affect nature – for future species and generations. Through interdisciplinary approaches and concepts, the contaminated site is examined with artistic processes among preservation, remediation, and rewilding, aiming to create a future so-called nature-culture reserve – a temporary platform to work with waste/pollution as a mixed and entangled nature-culture heritage. The project does not aim for decorative embellishment or a final solution, but unfolds at the threshold between preserving, remediating, and rewilding the site, between storytelling and ritualizing, history and future, and aims to develop embodied events and a model for a yet untested nature-culture heritage concept.
The Nature-Culture Reserve Marhult is initiated by the artist Timo Menke who leads, coordinates, and participates with a specific focus on the reserve as a self-organized platform and invites artists and other actors to develop the reserve. The project is conducted on a process basis throughout the entire triennial and relates transparently to its process through meeting places, labs/workshops, and embodied events where archaeologists, ecologists, writers, artists, and researchers can meet and share experiences regarding Marhult and other contaminated sites around Småland.
Several public embodied events are under planning and will take place in July/August and in September. Keep an eye on the website and on Småland Triennial's Instagram for current times, places, and programs.
