PARSEjournal

Featured articles for May 2026, chosen by Lucy Cathcart Frödén, artistic researcher based at Malmö University. ⁠ This selection is a gathering around the theme of sonic epistemologies. The featured works inhabit multiple, collective, and often multilingual forms of sounding and listening that open up new possibilities for creating, recognising and sharing knowledge. As a material that is layered, kinetic and situated, sound can help us to question the idea that it is possible to ‘approach’ a static research question from an imagined external position, instead placing us already inside the question, and allowing it to resonate around us. Silence, too, is critically and epistemically generative here, as Nana Oforiatta-Ayim reminds us (cited by Kitso Lynn Lelliott): "In the Akan language, knowledge was constituted anew with each retelling; elasticity of silence as important as authority of sound.⁠" ⁠ Visit parsejournal.com to reach the articles⁠.⁠

Open Call for External Editors⁠ Call Closes Monday 20 April 2026⁠ ⁠ PARSE invites submissions for external editors to propose content for a journal issue. Two proposals will be selected, one to be published in Autumn 2027 and one in Spring 2028. We are looking for proposals which collapse clear subject and disciplinary distinctions and demonstrate a desire to allow different knowledge forms to meet. We wish to work with editors who think of publishing not only as a form of dissemination but as a process through which forms of writing as well as themes are experimented with. We invite interested applicants to look through previous PARSE issues as well as our guidelines on article format, as the working group is particularly interested in proposals that expand the thematic reach of the journal and put forward article formats which contribute to the development of the field of artistic research.⁠ ⁠ Please share!⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio to reach the full call

Featured articles for April 2026, chosen by Steven Henry Madoff, Chair, MA Curatorial Practice, School of Visual Arts, New York; curator; art critic; poet.⁠ ⁠ Mirroring⁠ ⁠ Mirror, speculum, speculation… “Mirror” has three distinct turns over time from origins in Latin and Nordic usages to more recent ones [...] ⁠ The texts I’ve chosen here all address various types of mirroring that reflect our desires to capture the world and its tissues of subjectivity, tumbling our bodies in the pit of being: turned in the light, turned in the shadows, held up and emptied out, violated and admired. Each of these texts, in their reflections on artistic production and/as social apparatuses, are also intentional or inadvertent speculations on objectification, and therefore on the “museum-ing” of people, populations, and things, or all as things: displayed; historicized and memorialized; “de-feralized,” which is to say schematized as a condition of the dead—static and no longer able to live in the struggle.⁠ ⁠ Visit parsejournal.com to read the curatorial statement in full and reach the articles⁠.⁠

Open Call for External Editors⁠ Closes Monday 20 April 2026⁠ ⁠ PARSE invites submissions for external editors to propose content for a journal issue. Two proposals will be selected, one to be published in Autumn 2027 and one in Spring 2028. We are looking for proposals which collapse clear subject and disciplinary distinctions and demonstrate a desire to allow different knowledge forms to meet. We wish to work with editors who think of publishing not only as a form of dissemination but as a process through which forms of writing as well as themes are experimented with. We invite interested applicants to look through previous PARSE issues as well as our guidelines on article format, as the working group is particularly interested in proposals that expand the thematic reach of the journal and put forward article formats which contribute to the development of the field of artistic research.⁠ ⁠ Please share!⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio to reach the full call

A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth ⁠ Skogen, Masthuggsterrassen 3, 413 18 Göteborg⁠ ⁠ Saturday 11 April, 15–16:30⁠ ⁠ A reading by artist, interdisciplinary designer, and researcher Johnny Chang, presented within the context of the PARSE Practitioners Programme.⁠ ⁠ A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth is an in-progress lecture performance that traces how everyday foods—fruit, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, wild weeds, sticky rice dumplings, noodles—carry the entangled histories of survival, extraction, and everyday resilience across Taiwan and its diasporas.⁠ ⁠ Dwelling in archival gaps, in fractured languages shaped by shifting state policies and diasporic dislocation, and in the silences that structure intergenerational memory, this work follows ingredients and dishes across overlapping, unresolved colonial and imperial formations. Here, food is not simply cultural heritage, but a material witness to histories and lives shaped through the entanglement of settler colonialism, plantation economies, and their afterlives in displacement and exile.⁠ ⁠ Weaving personal, collective, and speculative fragments, the lecture performance moves through fragmented and reconstituted memory, reflecting on the tensions that haunt the ongoing negotiation of collective belonging, plurality, and solidarities in and beyond Taiwan. In attending to histories of both militant and everyday resistance, this work explores how different forms of struggle and unsettled histories are unevenly remembered and transmitted across generations, and carried through everyday food practices that both sustain and transform them.⁠ ⁠ This event is open to all and free to attend, See link in bio for more info.⁠ ⁠ image: (Top) Home care worker handing breakfast to my grandmother, Taipei. (Bottom Left) Reproduction of the “New Gourmet” restaurant sign at the Su Beng Memorial, New Taipei City. (Bottom Right) Fruit stand at the Chenghuang Temple Market, Hsinchu.⁠

Featured articles for March 2026, chosen by Ingrid Elam, writer and critic. She is a former Professor in Literary composition and the former Dean of the Artistic Faculty, University of Gothenburg and ex Chair of PARSE.⁠ ⁠ Everything is ‘narrative’ today, but what are we telling and how? Which stories remain untold, which are distorted? However different these nine contributions may be, they all revolve around storytelling, seeking new forms in bodily movements or publications beyond the codex, exploring communities and power relations, in short: they are telling stories!⁠ ⁠ Click the ⁠link in bio to reach the articles⁠

Featured articles for February 2026, chosen by Johnny Chang, designer, artist, researcher and current PARSE Practitioner.⁠ ⁠ ⁠ I've been trying to think through the possibilities and limitation of gathering. Gatherings come in many forms, from assembling together in a specific place, to convening with people and things through mediums, to being present with one another in a multitude of other ways. What might gathering do/ rupture/ foreclose? How might art and research contribute towards collective, interdisciplinary and everyday civic participation and agency, and in what ways can it/ should it/ should it not do so through critical practices of gathering? Gathering holds things in relation, bringing people and things nearby. This is fraught with tensions: shifting conditions and positionalities, assymmetries and impositions of access and refusal, structures of absence and hypervisibility, everpresent risk of extraction/ instrumentalisation/ commodification, language bariers and boundaries, and a plurality of irregularly desedimenting histories, spaces, memories, and temporalties. What gatherings have the capacity to hold and attend to these tensions—to hold our grief, anger, struggles, and joys like the water, its waves moving through and with each other without destruction?⁠ ⁠ Click the ⁠link in bio to reach the articles⁠

Featured articles for January 2026, chosen by Josefine Wikström, senior lecturer in the theory and practice of contemporary performative arts at HSM, and member of the PARSE Working Group.⁠ ⁠ From ironic and eighteenth-century Romantic ideas of performance, through British post–Second World War analytic philosophy and French post-structuralism’s linguistic ideas of performativity, to feminist and anticolonial thought on performance in relation to questions of identity, and onwards to performance as a specific aspect of productive labour in contemporary capitalism, these articles revolve around performance in its various critical modes. Performance, as a category, cuts across disciplines, historical periods and artistic genres, something these articles show through a range of essayistic and other forms of writing.⁠ ⁠ Click the ⁠link in bio to reach the articles⁠

Chaotic Degrowth via Artistic Practices ⁠ Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker⁠ ⁠ Audio documentation of an evening exploring urgent creative methodologies in the climate crisis through the lens of degrowth with Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker. Now available to listen and download.⁠ ⁠ Emerging from multiple streams of ecological and social thought, degrowth signifies a critique of the narrative of perpetual economic growth, and of the centering of growth as a social objective. Moreover, degrowth exposes a fundamental contradiction in the dominant capitalist mode: Infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. In a world addicted to production and prosperity, how can artists bring new strategies that centre well-being, care and collectivity into existence while being brutalised by the system they are wilfully failing? How do we reconceptualise artistic labour, production, and success in a degrowth context?⁠ ⁠ The evening began with Sean Roy Parker reading excerpts from his debut poetry collection stewarding (2024, Monitor Books), followed by a critical discussion led by Papademetriou examining how enacting practical degrowth principles can reshape our understandings of artistic practice, as detailed in her ongoing project, The Degrowth Toolbox for Artistic Practices, 2021-. More info at degrowthtoolbox.net ⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio to listen.⁠ ⁠ @alexandra.apapa ⁠ @fermental_health ⁠ ⁠ image: Alexandra Papademetriou and Sean Roy Parker in conversation, Pony Books, Gothenburg 26 September 2025.

#AdventuresInConcrete radio show now available to listen and download.⁠ ⁠ Recorded live on-site at LjurhallaFabriken for the Stewardship and Structures: Enacting, Regenerating and Maintaining seminar, 24 Sept 2025.⁠ ⁠ Adventures in Concrete⁠ Eva Rowson⁠ ⁠ "The brick wall 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 by concrete partitions. This presentation brings together diverse voices cracking concrete and building transformational, sustainable change from its ruins.⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio to listen and view the full track list.⁠ ⁠ image: LjurhallaFabriken, 2025, Rachel Barron⁠ ⁠ @evarowson ⁠ @ljurhalla.fabriken ⁠

This December, we invite you to enjoy an ambient mix from Jamie Hudson. The set is archived from the final day of Some Like it Hot, the 6th biennial PARSE conference, November 14, 2025.⁠ ⁠ Click the link in bio to listen⁠ ⁠ @jhud ⁠ ⁠

Encoding Culture: ⁠ The Swedish Cultural Canon through the Lens of Multimodal Dataset Curation⁠ ⁠ Paola Torres Nuñez del Prado⁠ ⁠ The formulation of a Swedish Cultural Canon by a committee of experts has sparked debate among cultural agents and the public: while some perceive it as controversial, others value its role in categorising and conserving key historical milestones of Swedish culture. “Encoding Culture” speculates that putting together cultural data as images and text for generative AI training may replicate the mechanisms of canon formation—both reflecting and reinforcing the underlying systems of cultural selection and valuation. AI models would embed the structural norms and biases that govern the intended data selection and organisation. The process of creating image datasets for Generative AI, often viewed as a neutral or purely technical process, encodes not only cultural narratives, but also biases and power dynamics. This paper explores the potential of these models as dynamic, generative systems that create outputs based on patterns, but also potentially embody and transmit cultural values. In doing so, the parameterisation of culture through dataset compilation emerges as a tangible phenomenon: as the algorithm seeks to capture shared patterns and structural rules among the samples, it parallels the concept of a “canon-as-model”. Presented at the 2024 Artistic Research symposium, this ongoing project foregrounds the interplay between programming practices and cultural encoding, where datasets act as reflections and agents of cultural normativity within AI-driven systems, with implications for how culture itself may be shaped in the age of AI.⁠ ⁠ Keywords: AI, Deep Learning, Cultural Canon, Art, Culture, Generative Art, Swedish Art⁠ ⁠ Visit the link in bio to read the text in full⁠ ⁠ @paolatorresnunezdelprado