The aim of the course is to provide students with an in-depth competence in literary-artistic writing, with a particular focus on developing their own text-based project that engages with ecocritical perspectives. Ecocriticism examines the interplay between human and more-than-human entities, highlighting the unexpected and changing relationships that shape our ecological and cultural contexts. The course explores writing as a creative and critical practice to investigate and activate the role of language in making visible, questioning and renegotiating these relationships. Through both practical and theoretical elements, students are given tools to reflect on their own and others’ texts, and to think speculatively about alternative ecological futures and narrative possibilities.
This course is an associated initiative of CAPIM and is accepting applications until April 8, 2025. For more details, please click here.
The course is held in Swedish.
Course: Feral Writing - Ecocritical dialogues
Course: On Friendship and the Political Imaginary
The course On Friendship and the Political Imaginary is an associated initiative of CAPIm. Originally developed in 2021 through the collaboration between Prof. Steven Henry Madoff (SVA New York) and Prof. Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand, Gothenburg.) The course has evolved in the context of CAPIm and is informed greatly by the research of the centre, particularly the work on Mapping the Political Imaginary (2025-2027).
Questions addressed include: What is the significance and agency – if any! – of the forms and affects of social relations (friend, neighbour, comrade, ally, kin, colleague, ancestor) in a moment of ascendant authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, oligarchy and neofascism?
This distance course introduces key themes and questions in respect of politics, affiliation and friendship with particular reference to contemporary art practices, theories and institutions.
The course is accepting applications until April 15, 2025.
The course is held in English.
Event: Presenting the 2025 Annual Symposium
Warmly welcome to the first annual symposium of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary in Gothenburg on the 28 and 29 of August 2025. Local, national and international artists, researchers and educators gather in Skeppet GBG and Bergsjön Kulturhuset to think together about ways in which art, politics and imagination can, or should, shape the futures we want – or end up creating the ones that fill us with fear.
The CAPIm Research Annual brings together associated researchers and guests to explore pertinent issues related to the center’s research strands.
Keynotes: María Galindo and Stefan Jonsson.
Summer School: “For a Justice to Come”
“For a Justice to Come” is a bi-annual Summer School for artists, curators, designers, and others whose work engages with the aesthetics of imagination. Its thematic framework is grounded in the work of French philosopher Jaques Derrida, who argued that justice must remain an idea that haunts and decentres the institutions that claim to arbitrate it. Derrida’s notion of justice does not and will not emerge from allegiance to established centres of power.
The Summer School welcomes participants from the MA, PhD, and MFA Programs at KKH and HDK Valand as well as international artistic researchers.
Course: Studio Practice - On the Performance of Research
The course proposes a critical and creative approach to lecture-performance as a format to convey and expose artistic research. How do performative techniques and methods affect and shape the conveyed research? And the other way around, how do specific research questions or practices call forth and require their own performative approach?
Dates: 7-10 April 2025
Facilitated by: Valentina Desideri
Associated Research: Decolonial Curatorial Methodology
Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens propose curatorial practice as a form of artistic research that goes beyond “metaphorizing decolonization.” The project has four principle aims: to centre the knowledge produced by the practice of curating (rather than that which it simply presents in the exhibition); to experiment with infrastructures that support “minor transnational” relationality; to experiment with institutional scale in relation to the exhibition; to work from and between two important margins of the European project—the Nordic region and North Africa—in an embodied manner that nevertheless acknowledges their distance from both.
Please read an interview on the project aims with KKH staff here. Llorens recently published this essay, which is based on the application and gives the full background from the project.
Welcome to CAPIm
The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research.
The activities of the Centre are organised around four conceptual strands guiding the construction of innovative educational and research frameworks. Climate Imaginaries engage with radical ecological change and environmental futures. Historical Imaginaries addresses decolonial approaches to collective memory and nationalist representations, as well as non-aligned movements and intensifying globalisation. Democratic Imaginaries takes its point of departure from the polarisation of the public sphere and emerging forms of illiberalism. Technological Imaginaries is focused on the interactions between art and technological developments and their resulting projections of possible futures.
CAPIm’s activities are designed to nourish the curriculum of the PhD program at HDK-Valand and in the MA program at KKH. CAPIm also provides national and international access to educational opportunities informed by the latest developments in artistic research and the study of political imaginaries. Some courses are designed specifically by CAPIm faculty and guest researchers, while others are affiliated based on thematic overlap.
CAPIm functions as an infrastructure to support new research initiatives and aggregate existing research in the field. Associated research consists of both projects led and executed by CAPIm staff and collaborations with those external to its core faculty.
The advisory board meets four times annually to provide external perspective on the Centre’s thematic investments, strengthen its collaborations both nationally and internationally, and contribute with their own research through participation in CAPIm’s annual conference.
Visit our events page to learn more, stay updated, and register for our upcoming events.
Welcome to CAPIm
The Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary is committed to interdisciplinary practice and research in the meeting between contemporary art and the future of politics. Based at two institutions of higher education in art: HDK-Valand and Kungl. Konsthögskolan, the Centre’s aim is to facilitate connections between research and education through an engagement with experimental approaches. It is the first Swedish Centre of Excellence in the field of Artistic Research.
The activities of the Centre are organised around four conceptual strands guiding the construction of innovative educational and research frameworks. Climate Imaginaries engage with radical ecological change and environmental futures. Historical Imaginaries addresses decolonial approaches to collective memory and nationalist representations, as well as non-aligned movements and intensifying globalisation. Democratic Imaginaries takes its point of departure from the polarisation of the public sphere and emerging forms of illiberalism. Technological Imaginaries is focused on the interactions between art and technological developments and their resulting projections of possible futures.
CAPIm’s activities are designed to nourish the curriculum of the PhD program at HDK-Valand and in the MA program at KKH. CAPIm also provides national and international access to educational opportunities informed by the latest developments in artistic research and the study of political imaginaries. Some courses are designed specifically by CAPIm faculty and guest researchers, while others are affiliated based on thematic overlap.
CAPIm functions as an infrastructure to support new research initiatives and aggregate existing research in the field. Associated research consists of both projects led and executed by CAPIm staff and collaborations with those external to its core faculty.
The advisory board meets four times annually to provide external perspective on the Centre’s thematic investments, strengthen its collaborations both nationally and internationally, and contribute with their own research through participation in CAPIm’s annual conference.
Visit our events page to learn more, stay updated, and register for our upcoming events.
Course: Feral Writing - Ecocritical dialogues
The aim of the course is to provide students with an in-depth competence in literary-artistic writing, with a particular focus on developing their own text-based project that engages with ecocritical perspectives. Ecocriticism examines the interplay between human and more-than-human entities, highlighting the unexpected and changing relationships that shape our ecological and cultural contexts. The course explores writing as a creative and critical practice to investigate and activate the role of language in making visible, questioning and renegotiating these relationships. Through both practical and theoretical elements, students are given tools to reflect on their own and others’ texts, and to think speculatively about alternative ecological futures and narrative possibilities.
This course is an associated initiative of CAPIM and is accepting applications until April 8, 2025. For more details, please click here.
The course is held in Swedish.
Course: On Friendship and the Political Imaginary
The course On Friendship and the Political Imaginary is an associated initiative of CAPIm. Originally developed in 2021 through the collaboration between Prof. Steven Henry Madoff (SVA New York) and Prof. Mick Wilson (HDK-Valand, Gothenburg.) The course has evolved in the context of CAPIm and is informed greatly by the research of the centre, particularly the work on Mapping the Political Imaginary (2025-2027).
Questions addressed include: What is the significance and agency – if any! – of the forms and affects of social relations (friend, neighbour, comrade, ally, kin, colleague, ancestor) in a moment of ascendant authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, oligarchy and neofascism?
This distance course introduces key themes and questions in respect of politics, affiliation and friendship with particular reference to contemporary art practices, theories and institutions.
The course is accepting applications until April 15, 2025.
The course is held in English.
Event: Presenting the 2025 Annual Symposium
Warmly welcome to the first annual symposium of the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary in Gothenburg on the 28 and 29 of August 2025. Local, national and international artists, researchers and educators gather in Skeppet GBG and Bergsjön Kulturhuset to think together about ways in which art, politics and imagination can, or should, shape the futures we want – or end up creating the ones that fill us with fear.
The CAPIm Research Annual brings together associated researchers and guests to explore pertinent issues related to the center’s research strands.
Keynotes: María Galindo and Stefan Jonsson.
Summer School: “For a Justice to Come”
“For a Justice to Come” is a bi-annual Summer School for artists, curators, designers, and others whose work engages with the aesthetics of imagination. Its thematic framework is grounded in the work of French philosopher Jaques Derrida, who argued that justice must remain an idea that haunts and decentres the institutions that claim to arbitrate it. Derrida’s notion of justice does not and will not emerge from allegiance to established centres of power.
The Summer School welcomes participants from the MA, PhD, and MFA Programs at KKH and HDK Valand as well as international artistic researchers.
Course: Studio Practice - On the Performance of Research
The course proposes a critical and creative approach to lecture-performance as a format to convey and expose artistic research. How do performative techniques and methods affect and shape the conveyed research? And the other way around, how do specific research questions or practices call forth and require their own performative approach?
Dates: 7-10 April 2025
Facilitated by: Valentina Desideri
Associated Research: Decolonial Curatorial Methodology
Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens propose curatorial practice as a form of artistic research that goes beyond “metaphorizing decolonization.” The project has four principle aims: to centre the knowledge produced by the practice of curating (rather than that which it simply presents in the exhibition); to experiment with infrastructures that support “minor transnational” relationality; to experiment with institutional scale in relation to the exhibition; to work from and between two important margins of the European project—the Nordic region and North Africa—in an embodied manner that nevertheless acknowledges their distance from both.
Please read an interview on the project aims with KKH staff here. Llorens recently published this essay, which is based on the application and gives the full background from the project.