Stewardship and Structures: Enacting, Regenerating and Maintaining with Sean Roy Parker and Eva Rowson. Lunch provided by Andreas Engman.
This event explores the intimate politics of care through the methodology of world building—physical structures that (are yet to) exist and maintain, material lifecycle systems, and communal distribution of responsibility. Drawing from three artists’ shared politic that we are held in webs of interdependence with our localities, environments and communities, together we will investigate how artistic practices can embody disruption, embrace slowness, practice thrift, and foster deep connection.
Through two distinct yet synergetic presentations, we examine how critical frameworks—concrete, chaotic and conceptual—can transform perceived barriers into foundations for reshaping our relationship with the world during a polycrisis.
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-Sean Roy Parker Intuitive Sensing
“delayed digestion a shift of state
dissolve my borders / surrender to deep minerality”
- from Hospitality in “stewarding”, published by Monitor Books, 2024
A session exploring practical ways to critically engage with our innate role as Consumer. We will work towards accepting temporality and embracing chaos as a path to belonging with the world. Through forest bathing, experimental writing, attention to plant life, and radical amateurism, Parker guides participants to finding home within their own bodies while suggesting how a ‘degrowth’ future requires drastic decay of norms.
This presentation focuses on the practices of careful observation, conscious slowing, and mindful digestion of experience as forms of environmental and personal stewardship. It invites participants to consider how artistic practice can become a form of at-tending—to ourselves, each other, and the more-than-human world.
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-Eva Rowson Adventures in Concrete: Maintenance, care and courage in changing concretised structures
‘The brickwall is what you come against when you are involved in the practical project of opening worlds to bodies that have historically been excluded from those worlds. An organisation can be a world; a neighbourhood; a street; a home; a nation’ –Sara Ahmed
Presented as a radio show mixing music, reflection, and etymological exploration, Eva Rowson excavates the polysemic* nature of "concrete"—simultaneously a building material, something definite, and the act of solidifying. Through this format, she examines how we might demolish concretised walls in society while sustaining new, accessible structures that lift the concrete ceiling for collective liberation.
Concretised structures possess deep foundations that sustain them as "just the way things are." Yet the opposite of concrete need not be structureless—radical structure can provide vital support and empowerment, particularly for those historically excluded from concrete partitions. This presentation brings together diverse voices cracking concrete and building transformational, sustainable change from its ruins.
* A polysemic word is a word that has multiple meanings. In the case of concrete: a building material; a description meaning something definite; and to form or solidify something.
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Semi-foraged rocket stove cooked vegan lunch by Andreas Engman.
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This event is programmed as part of the "Close Attention" research theme of PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden).
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Practical info:
LjurhallaFabriken is situated at Ornunga 8, Vårgårda.
All welcome! A free bus is arranged to depart from outside Akademin Valand, Vasagatan 50 at 10:00 on September 24 in order to arrive at Ljurhallafabriken for 11:00, returning to Gothenburg for 18:00.
Vegan lunch will be provided.
The event is free- but to secure a place registration is required (we have limited spaces on the bus and need to know how many are coming for the food planning and prep).
The event will be in English.
Any questions contact: [email protected]
Proposed schedule for day:
10:00 bus departs Gbg
11:00 Arrive LjurhallaFabriken/ Grounding exercises
11:30 Sean Roy Parker / Intuitive Sensing
13:30 collective lunch with Andreas Engman
14:30 Eva Rowson/ Adventures in Concrete
17:00 bus home
18:00 arrive Gbg
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Bios
Sean Roy Parker is a visual artist, writer and landworker who works open-endedly across many disciplines including sculpture, installation, foraging, cooking, publishing, workshops and community gardening. Until its closure, he was a core member of The Field, an experimental artist-run living project in an ex-Steiner School building in Derbyshire, East Midlands.
Roy practises slow, low-tech crafts and food preservation with consumer waste and wild abundance, and shares extensively through labour exchange, favours and artswaps. Against the backdrop of the climate crisis and class division, he challenges the received understanding of what constitutes artistic production through his process-led and (re)generative practice. Under the name Fermental Health, he writes about material lifecycles, interspecies intimacy and collaborative problem-solving through the lens of food justice. In the spirit of degrowth much of his work gets eaten, composted or repurposed.
Roy is a board member of Two Queens, an artist-run gallery and studio complex based in Leicester, UK, that is breaking ground as a Community Benefit Society. He attended nomadic altMA School of the Damned in 2016/17 and was in residency at Wysing Arts Centre 2023-24. In 2024 he received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Visual Artist Award, and published ‘stewarding’, his debut collection of poetry, with Monitor Books, London.
Eva Rowson is an artist, curator and Managing Director of Bergen Kjøtt, one of Norway´s largest non-profit cultural centers for music production and an award-winning venue for accessibility and inclusion, including “GRIP”, a training program to empower more women, non-binary and transgender people as sound and light engineers.
Eva´s curatorial work is rooted in hosting, maintenance and collaboration – focusing on how different types of work are valued, and with what consequences. This research is at the core of her ongoing maintenance work at Bergen Kjøtt #AdventuresInConcrete as well as curatorial projects including :´Who’s doing the washing up?´on the politics of institutional re-imagining (Bergen Kunsthall, Norway / Lighthouse Brighton, UK, 2018-19) and ´Como imaginar una musea?’ - a Catalan-Spanish-English imagining of a feminist cultural institution (BAR Project, Barcelona, 2017-19).
Eva is a board member of AKKS Norway that works for gender equality in the Norwegian music scene and a participant in the Keychange Talent Leadership Programme 2025 for women and gender-diverse creatives to lead change in the music industry. She has led the course “Collaborative Practices” at the Faculty of Art, University of Bergen since 2019.
Andreas Engman
I’m an artist, educator, and former chef living and working in Gothenburg. My artistic practice is rooted in a conceptual and research-driven methodology. A long-standing interest in my work is investigating the many productive entanglements formed in the intersection of institutional critique, political philosophy, politics of food, and performance practices. My works are associative, open-ended assemblages that often meet the public through installations, performances, and soundscapes. I frequently seek counter-rational strategies and speculative forms of meaning-making when producing work. I’m interested in how metaphor can open up speculative reframings and new interpretations of a specific subject. And how to practice methods of cross-pollination to try to see things in a new light by borrowing the specificities from one field of study to contaminate old customs in the crossover between subjects and new ways of knowing. My experience as a professional chef offers material knowledge and practical skills to my work on food and commensality.
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Image credit: (I) Sean Roy Parker, page from “stewarding”, Monitor Books 2024, (II) Eva Rowson, ventilation hole in concrete wall, Bergen Kjøtt, Norway, 2023 (background) Nathan Clydesdale, LjurhallaFabriken surrounds, 2025.