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Chill Survive Network


Chill Survive network will serve as a platform for mutual exchange and collaboration among researchers, curators, artists and institutions in the North engaged in human and nonhuman entanglements and development of new strategies, methodology and language that speak to our present ecological crisis. The objective is to explore, learn, mediate, cope with the future transformations in the Arctic. The network consists of several physical and online meetings including seminars and workshops.

The aim of Chill Survive network is to connect researchers and artists with scientists and institutions to explore hybrid ontology, human/non-human narratives, knowledge and practices for a sustainable future North.

Chill Survive network fosters shared understanding, practices and pedagogy of how to survive on a planet in transformation. We seek and exchange current experiences, indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage, and local competences in order to invent and re-invent ways to co-habit in a world of many co-dependent, co-operative, and co-creative beings, such as soil, turf, micro-organisms, minerals, fungi, animals and plants.

Engaged in thinking about human and nonhuman entanglements from a multitude of aspects Chill Survive network participants are already working in interdisciplinary ways in the natural, social and political landscapes of the Arctic.

Chill Survive network takes as its point of departure the resilience and potential of nature. We take our inspiration from the mutually dependent relation of plant roots and fungi - the mycorrhizae. Without this symbiotic relation neither the metabolizing fungi nor the hosting plant survives. Compared to soils in warmer climates, the density of mycorrhizae living in the roots of plants in the Arctic is four times higher. In an uncertain planetary future, this rich diversity embedded in the soil is an organic deposit for genes to unfold, for our imagination to expand and to co-create new possibilities of thinking and living.

Climate change has brought on many transformations in the North generating an increasing threat to biodiversity. Melting ice on Greenland reveals and makes accessible not only natural resources - to be exploited with increased risk of polluting grounds, waters, and air - but also toxic waste from old military camps seeps through the melting ice. Greenland is at the frothy frontiers of a global transformation and thus, together with Tromsø and Kilpisjärvi, a site of tundra and the Sapmi sacred mountain Saana, are important site for Chill Survive fieldwork.

Compared to the sensory equipment of many animals, plants, and microbes, human intellect and sense perception prove surprisingly limited. Learning from field research and dialogue with senses and intellects of the non-human in nature and further sharing old and newly acquired knowledge, local competences and heritage between various localities in the North, the network partners from Greenland, Iceland, Finland and Denmark will ask questions such as:

How may soil, turf, micro-organism, animals, fungi and plants integrate and translate their experiences and life processes to be sensed or understood by the limited human emotional, sensory, and intellectual register?

How can we humans become “companion species” to our planetary "other"?

How do non-humans in the Arctic constitute language and wisdom?

How can humans learn from this wisdom beyond discrete words – to help us cope with a possible future yet unrevealed to us?

The network consists of online communication and several physical meetings in Finland, Greenland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden including seminars and workshops. It will not simply lay the groundwork for developing connections and collaborations within and between individuals and institutions, but it will also put together an online site introducing the network participants’ methodologies, research, experiences and knowledge. Finally at the end of the year the network will have the resources to initiate the next phase - a three-year collaboration resulting in exhibitions, seminars, and publication.

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