Praxis of Social Imaginaries - a Theo-artistic Intervention for Transdisciplinary Knowledge

Indigenous scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer uses the metaphor of a Garden when she explains what it means to cultivate sustainable knowledge that incorporates both scientific ecological knowledge used in western university structures, and traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous and local peoples based on millennia of lived and inherited experiences. She writes that in order for these two systems to support each other in finding sustainable solutions for our future on this planet, a third element is needed; the cultivation of wisdom (Kimmerer 2013). This project boldly states that wisdom is found in encounters - both past and present.
In a similar way as Kimmerer’s description, this project brings together three different components; theological understanding of social imaginaries, cosmologies and polysemous reading practices, artistic research methods of intervention, and indigenous or traditional ways of knowledge production including listening and storytelling. Through creating nomadic and community based symposia where we bring together people from across the Nordic region, with students and researchers from Åbo Akademi Univeristy and the global south, as well as artists and activists to transdisciplinary symposia and art based dialogue sessions, we want to cultivate practices of wisdom, ask bold questions, and train critical inquiry into how colonial patterns are influencing society and universities today.
We take our starting point in medieval travelling accounts, with a special emphasis on the writing of Olaus Magnus (1490-1557) in his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus (1555). We use these historic encounters as a plattform for learning and facilitating dialogue between different kinds of knowledge systems. Particularly in our collaboration with the Åbo Akademi University (ÅAU) Foundations new Centre of Excellence: Sustainable Ocean Sciences (SOS), and our indigenous community researchers, we do not only want to probe at the colonial patterns of history but ask what can be learnt from the disruptions of the past for creating transitions to more sustainable futures.