The Swedish Trans4Demo Team, consisting of Harald Rohracher, Fredrik Envall and Karin Edberg from Linköping University, has an ongoing collaboration with the Danish artist Birthe Jørgensen.
Jørgensen is since a few years back based on the Swedish island Gotland, where she has initiated a new district for Konstfrämjandet (the People's Movements for Art Promotion), based on the belief that artists can bring a sense of care and complexity to polarized debates on Sweden’s green industry transition. This, together with Jørgensens artistic practices of placed based repair, ties in well with the research focus of the Trans4Demo project, an act as foundation for the collaboration.
Gotland is also one of the locations in which the team currently do field work for the Trans4Demo WP4, exploring underlying causes of protests and contestation around sustainability transitions, and their consequences for implementation of transition-related policies and liberal democratic practices, with a particular focus on wind power development.
During the second week of September, parts of the team (Envall and Edberg) visited the island to attend the exhibition “Träsket, kyrkan och fästningen” (‘The Marsh, the Church and the Fortress’). This artistic collaboration centred on existentially pressing issues, in which the local place (Tingstäde) became a microcosm reflecting a changing and challenging contemporary world. As the description states: ”In an era characterised by climate change, geopolitical conflicts and social transformation, the exhibition raises questions about how we coexist with the world on which we depend. (...) Local history reflects wider geopolitical shifts, whilst existential questions of identity, belonging, vulnerability, responsibility and hope are given space.”
The exhibition included art works in all three locations, the marsh, the church and the fortress, but also concerts, performances and a live-radio event. In the latter, Envall participated in one of the talks, discussing preparedness and children together with a local artist.
Jørgensen is a 2026 artist-in-residence at Linköping University. As part of the collaboration, the exhibition “Invocations” was set up at one of university campuses during spring 2026, showing a selection of Jørgensen’s works. In connection to the opening of the exhibition, the joint workshop “following the materials” “ was organised, gathering researchers from different parts of the university speculatively tracing how objects with a personal meaning to them are composed of materials moving through cycles of production, circulation, use, and afterlife and shifting between active and passive states within the global economy and across different realms of meaning. Additional events are planned for later this autumn.