Exhibition dates: Monday 19 January - Friday 20 February
Opening hours: 10am-8pm
Location: LSE Arts Atrium Gallery, LSE Houghton Street, London. Entry is free
Sensing energy transition is an exhibition that explores how people experience the sounds, textures, and atmospheres of energy transition. The exhibition showcases work from Living with Energy Transition, a collaborative project focused on a series of public soundwalks by artist Maja Zećo.
The soundwalks focused on St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, Aberdeen – a site partially earmarked for development as an energy transition zone. Sound walking is a practice of listening while walking. Each walk was an artwork involving careful attention to the park and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Participants followed specific routes that drew attention to the diverse sounds emanating from different features around the park and travelling across it.
Energy transition is often presented as a pathway to a sustainable future. The soundwalks uncovered a more complicated story – one where the promise of economic opportunity goes hand in hand with a reordering of environments, ways of knowing, and practices of care and belonging. Sensing energy transition explores how this unsettling of lived experience is sensed in different ways. It comprises a new body of artistic work informed by the soundwalks, alongside ephemera and photographic documentation. These works are not simply documentation but reflecting multiple experiences of listening to St Fittick's Park, thus revealing new perspectives on energy transition as an uneven, contested and lived process.
The exhibition has been realised, over the past two years, through a dialogue between anthropology and the arts. Through practice-based research, the team have developed ways of thinking, making, and creating knowledge that contribute to their respective fields as well as engage with sound beyond established disciplinary frames.
More about the exhibition
Sensing energy transition is organised by LSE Anthropology in association with LSE Arts and funding from the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund. The exhibition emerges from an interdisciplinary project 'Living with Energy Transition' involving anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys, urbanist William Otchere-Darko, curator Rachel Grant, and artist-researcher Maja Zećo in collaboration with community partner Friends of St. Fittick's Park. Visual artist Phoebe McBride documented the soundwalks through photographs.
The soundwalks built on insights from earlier qualitative research by Otchere-Darko and Weszkalnys, which examined the ambivalent and critical local response to the proposed Aberdeen energy transition zone. The soundwalks were open to the public, with participants including both Torry residents who knew the site intimately and first-time visitors. We are grateful to participants for allowing us to share their notes and reflections as part of the exhibition.
The project has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/S011080/1), the Department of Anthropology at LSE, and the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund. Community partner Friends of St Fittick’s Park were remunerated via funds provided by the transdisciplinary working group ‘Intersecting Energy Cultures’ (The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, the Kleinman Centre for Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania, and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh).
During the exhibition the team will be hosting 'Sensing transition: arts methodologies and the politics of energy futures', an interdisciplinary workshop inviting artists, activists, and researchers to reflect on what sensory approaches can do: how they might sense the energy transition otherwise and imagine energy futures beyond technical narratives.
For more information on the exhibition and how to get there, visit the link below:
https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/arts-and-music/exhibitions/exhibitions/sensing-energy-transition
Opening hours: 10am-8pm
Location: LSE Arts Atrium Gallery, LSE Houghton Street, London. Entry is free
Sensing energy transition is an exhibition that explores how people experience the sounds, textures, and atmospheres of energy transition. The exhibition showcases work from Living with Energy Transition, a collaborative project focused on a series of public soundwalks by artist Maja Zećo.
The soundwalks focused on St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, Aberdeen – a site partially earmarked for development as an energy transition zone. Sound walking is a practice of listening while walking. Each walk was an artwork involving careful attention to the park and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Participants followed specific routes that drew attention to the diverse sounds emanating from different features around the park and travelling across it.
Energy transition is often presented as a pathway to a sustainable future. The soundwalks uncovered a more complicated story – one where the promise of economic opportunity goes hand in hand with a reordering of environments, ways of knowing, and practices of care and belonging. Sensing energy transition explores how this unsettling of lived experience is sensed in different ways. It comprises a new body of artistic work informed by the soundwalks, alongside ephemera and photographic documentation. These works are not simply documentation but reflecting multiple experiences of listening to St Fittick's Park, thus revealing new perspectives on energy transition as an uneven, contested and lived process.
The exhibition has been realised, over the past two years, through a dialogue between anthropology and the arts. Through practice-based research, the team have developed ways of thinking, making, and creating knowledge that contribute to their respective fields as well as engage with sound beyond established disciplinary frames.
More about the exhibition
Sensing energy transition is organised by LSE Anthropology in association with LSE Arts and funding from the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund. The exhibition emerges from an interdisciplinary project 'Living with Energy Transition' involving anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys, urbanist William Otchere-Darko, curator Rachel Grant, and artist-researcher Maja Zećo in collaboration with community partner Friends of St. Fittick's Park. Visual artist Phoebe McBride documented the soundwalks through photographs.
The soundwalks built on insights from earlier qualitative research by Otchere-Darko and Weszkalnys, which examined the ambivalent and critical local response to the proposed Aberdeen energy transition zone. The soundwalks were open to the public, with participants including both Torry residents who knew the site intimately and first-time visitors. We are grateful to participants for allowing us to share their notes and reflections as part of the exhibition.
The project has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/S011080/1), the Department of Anthropology at LSE, and the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund. Community partner Friends of St Fittick’s Park were remunerated via funds provided by the transdisciplinary working group ‘Intersecting Energy Cultures’ (The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, the Kleinman Centre for Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania, and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh).
During the exhibition the team will be hosting 'Sensing transition: arts methodologies and the politics of energy futures', an interdisciplinary workshop inviting artists, activists, and researchers to reflect on what sensory approaches can do: how they might sense the energy transition otherwise and imagine energy futures beyond technical narratives.
For more information on the exhibition and how to get there, visit the link below:
https://www.lse.ac.uk/events/arts-and-music/exhibitions/exhibitions/sensing-energy-transition
