ARTICA LISTENS 2022: RETURN TO NATURE? THE TRANSFORMATION OF A POST-COAL MINING LANDSCAPE

16 SEPTEMBER 2022

For Artica Listens 2022 we hosted a public symposium at The Arctic University of Norway, Academy of Arts in Tromsø on 16th September 2022. Inviting leading experts from the Nordics in architecture, ecology, archaeology, history and the arts to discuss the Svea environmental clean-up project and related issues.

• How do you protect and restore nature and the landscape after extraction?

• What was there before, how has it changed and what will be left behind?

• How do you “clean-up” without compromising cultural heritage?

• What would it look like if we worked with nature and design to help solve some of these issues?

The guest speakers were:

Thomas Juel Clemmensen - Professor of Landscape Architecture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Head of the landscape architecture programme at the Academy of Arts in Tromsø.

New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė) - A platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface.

Maria Jensen - Associate Professor in Arctic Geology at The University Centre in Svalbard and Head of the Arctic Geology Department.

Ingvild Sæbu Vatn and Lilli Wickström - Architects at LPO Arkitekter’s office in Longyearbyen.

Kjerstin Uhre - Associate Professor in landscape architecture at UiT, the Academy of Fine Arts in Tromsø and partner at Dahl & Uhre Architects, who have received awards for their urban and built projects.

Anatolijs Venovcevs - PhD candidate in the Institute for Archaeology, History, Religious Studies, and Theology at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway as part of the project Unruly Heritage: An Archaeology of the Anthropocene.