Queer Fire: On Touching and Being Touched (Lecture)

Following her contribution to CAPIm’s Annual Symposium in August 2025, Liv Bugge returns with a lecture that expands on the ideas explored in the two part workshop at KKH Queer Fire: On Touching and Being Touched. Drawing from Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff’s essay “Queer Fire: Ecology, Combustion and Pyrosexual Desire”, Bugge explores fire as both metaphor and material force – a site where intimacy confronts destruction and the conditions of transformation under compustion economy forces entanglements across time and bodies.

The lecture considers how desire and combustion operate beyond the human, tracing their entanglement with extractive economies, reproduction, and care. Touch becomes a key concept: not as a gesture of recognition, but as a way of thinking-with, a practice that resists separation between bodies, energies, and worlds.

Bugge weaves philosophical reflection with documentation from her own artistic research, including works developed during her PhD “The Other Wild: Touching Art as Confrontation” (Oslo National Academy of the Arts, 2019). Her presentation invites a collective reflection on how learning, affect, and politics might emerge from acts of contact rather than control.

studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Belgium. She completed her PhD, “The Other Wild: Touching Art as Confrontation”, at Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2019. Bugge’s research explores how mechanisms in society are internalized and contribute to the maintaining of normative notions and ethics around, for example, such dichotomies as life and non-life or human and nature. Liv has a practice informed by queer and feminist perspectives and was during the period 2012-2020 running the platform FRANK together with artist Sille Storihle. 

Bugge has had solo presentations at, among other places: Marabouparken Konsthall in Stockholm, Kunstnernes Hus and Intercultural Museum in Oslo, and Sørlandets Kunstmuseum in Kristiansand. She is part of the 2022 Venice Biennale and has previously presented work at among others Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art. She is Associate Professor of Sculpture and Installation at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo.