Godsbanen in a String Figure Perspective: Udstilling til Open 2025, Arkitektskolen Aarhus

The research project Sustainable Cultural Environments explores the complex, temporal, and living connections that constitute cultural environments. Cultural environments are called “kulturmiljø” in Danish, and it is a heritage category that consists of a built whole of both structures, buildings, and landscape.

Inspired by professor emerita and theoretician Donna Haraway’s notion of String Figures, the exhibition investigates the cultural environment of Godsbanen through a mapping of the site’s critters and their interrelations from a cultural environment perspective. Critters consists of the site’s actors, its microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, machines, etc., that are interconnected and in unison constitute the site. The notion of string figures is a part of Haraway’s, so called, “SF”: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far”. In other words: SF is her means of figuring out a way for us to “get on together” in these deeply troublesome times of exploitation, inequality, and mass extinction.

The SF, along with the string figure analogy, is a practice for creating imaginative patterns of thinking that can lead to new insights. It underlines the importance of recognising and exploring the interconnectedness of the world.

String figures stem from the game or storytelling method of forming narratives through strings. Also called Cat’s Cradle.

The exhibition relays the surrounding area Godsbanen in a string figure storytelling of connections and critters. Note that the connections are formed from a cultural environment perspective, and remember that it matters what thoughts think thoughts. Participants were invited to engage with, challenge, and add to the selected critters and connections from their personal or professional perspective.

The exhibition relates to an emerging heritage discourse where interdisciplinary collaborations and the entanglements between buildings, humans, more-than-humans, and landscapes demand greater attention.

Haraway wishes us:

All the best in string figuring for earthly survival,
Donna