A seminar with Dr Taru Elfving and Lotta Petronella organised by Contemporary Art Archipelago and the Centre for Art and Ecology, Goldsmiths
27 February 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
What might site-sensitivity rather than site-specificity mean as a political, ethical and aesthetic commitment? Sensitivity shifts emphasis from the objects or sites of attention to the practices of engagement, to perceptiveness rather than perception, to responsiveness and sensibilities. It encourages sensing the way before any attempts at making sense, so as to safeguard the un-predefined space-time of encounters. Sensing implies figuring out how to request permission, what guidance to look for, who makes meaning and has stories to tell, how the senses of the place can be shared, and what might the impacts of my landing on a site be. It is not up to a human individual alone to determine these specificities and their timelines, means or ends. Rather, site-sensitivity calls for attentiveness to all the human and more-than-human communities, who were already on-site and who will bear the consequences of our actions. It demands acknowledgement that sites also affect us, and when becoming sensitised our practices need to be adjusted and realigned accordingly.
Seminar on site-sensitivity gathers together to reflect on what might this mean in and through practice in the expanded field of contemporary art. It addresses site-sensitivity neither as an alternative to the notion of site-specificity nor as a particular applicable methodology as such, but rather as an emergent approach that can only arise out of processes and practices of entanglement with specific sites. To begin the conversation, curator Taru Elfving and artist Lotta Petronella share their collaborative practices, which are deeply indebted to and informed by the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea, where they have been working for years together with scientists and artists. From this situated perspective Elfving and Petronella continue to address the intricately interwoven ecological and biopolitical histories as they manifest in the present and gesture towards possible futures, across various temporal and geographical scales.
The participants are invited to bring to the seminar experiences and examples on how we might understand site-sensitivity from a range of partial perspectives. The discussion sets out to explore how site-sensitive practices might also hold significant potential in nurturing inter/transdisciplinary collaborations that are urgently required in response to the web of escalating socio-ecological crises. Site-sensitive approaches might even guide us towards undisciplinarity, to critically reflect on how the hierarchical structures of knowledge discipline our practices and encounters.
Towards Site-Sensitivity is organised by the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths, University of London in partnership with CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and it contributes to the development of a future collaborative research project. The seminar is part of the launch activities of the Undisciplinary Institute for Art and Ecology, a new initiative by CAA.
CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago is a curatorial collective founded by Elfving and Petronella. CAA has been initiating longterm enquiries in Turku Archipelago, off the southwest coast of Finland since 2009 in collaboration with artists, diverse scientific organisations, and other actors across the Baltic Sea region. https://contemporaryartarchipelago.org/
Taru Elfving is a curator and writer focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. As artistic director of CAA, she leads a research residency programme on the island of Seili in collaboration with the Archipelago Research Institute (University of Turku, FI). She is also a curatorial researcher at the newly launched Centre for Sustainable Ocean Science SOS at Åbo Akademi University (FI). She has a PhD from Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London.
Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and writer based on an island in Finland. She has worked with and on islands for nearly two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili. Her latest work Materia Medica of Islands was previewed at Vallisaari, Helsinki Biennial in 2023. In addition to her filmmaking and art practice, Petronella is a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. She also writes poems, makes soundscapes and runs a podcast called Little Screams.
Lotta Petronella, Själö Poeisis, 2022. Photo: Jussi Virkkumaa