Ways of knowing – To Stage the Unthinkable

The seminar is part of the seminar series “Ways of knowing Spring 2025” where we every Wednesday this Spring explore how Ways of Knowing manifest themselves in the field of artistic research right now. Read more about the seminar series and find upcoming seminars.

What role can art play when the unthinkable happens, when that which must not happen happens and makes life uncomprehensible? When loved ones, children, are murdered, plunging those affected into an abyss of deepest darkness and grief. Can art in some way help to understand and make life somehow a little easier to bear? How can we as artists approach those affected, and how can we work together? How can we find common creative processes, expressions, and dramaturgies that give meaning? What can art bring to audiences and people in society around these issues and incomprehensible events that fill our news feeds far too often? Can art somehow help us in this grief, in the grief of the individual but also in the collective?

This Wednesday seminar “To Stage the Unthinkable: on grief and loss and the potential role of art” will present and discuss two recent works, a documentary film and a music theatre performance, that are both based on events where young people have been murdered.

The film fifteen zero three nineteenth of january two thousand sixteen explores how everyday routines and gestures are transformed when a mother loses her child in the violence impacting Swedish outskirts since the early 2000s. The film depicts how a home can hold both mourning and resistance. The film refuses one-dimensional depictions of the violence currently taking place in the outskirts of Swedish cities. It portrays how Carolina Sinisalo’s routines and gestures are transformed when her children are shot. How a home holds memories, but also the possibility of refusal and change. How the kitchen table becomes a place to mourn, share stories, and mobilize.
fifteen zero three nineteenth of january two thousand sixteen is the third installment of the four-part film project Looking for Jeanne, based on Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles from 1975 by Chantal Akerman.

Peter. Tid (Peter. Time) is a music theatre performance that took place in September 2024 at the Orion Theatre in Stockholm. It is based on Dmitri Plax's book ‘Peter’, which depicts the time after his 16-year-old son was murdered by a peer.
“On 2 August at 22.01 in 2019, a call comes to the alarm centre.
‘Hello. I have murdered a person.’
A few hours later, the police knock on the door of the writer Dmitri Plax. The murder victim is his son: Peter Plax, aged 16. Dmitri hears the incomprehensible words. And falls down without a word. What else can you do?
– It is a crisis story about a father who refuses to accept what has happened because acceptance is a step in a staircase that leads away from Peter. Instead, he seeks to get as close to Peter as possible, like a butterfly seeks light, says director Jacob Hirdwall.
‘There is no real time in the story. The only time that exists are the memories that the father—played by Andreas Liljeholm—recalls of his son. By trying to remember every conversation, he tries to keep Peter alive.
Despite the darkness of the story, the conversations are warm fragments of time of a parent remembering his child.
The outside world is portrayed by four singers and a pianist on stage, but there is no one to portray Peter. He is missing. That is what is unfathomable.” (From the presentation text of the performance)
Peter. Tid was directed by Jacob Hirdwall, the music was composed by Kent Olofsson, and Fredrik Malmberg led the Harmony of Voices and was the pianist in the performance.

Participants in the seminar:

Carolina Sinisalo is an activist and mother

Dmitri Plax is a Swedish director, writer, playwright, artist and translator, born in Belarus. He is also active as a radio and film producer. In recent years, he has been the artistic director of Dramaten.Doc where the program is continuously planned to capture current events in the world. Currently, playwrights, authors and directors from Belarus, Ukraine and Russia are presented there.

Jacob Hirdwall is a theatre director and dramaturge connected with Dramaten in Stockholm. There he has directed a number of productions, including Requiem for a Demonstrator (2012) and Paralysie générale Redux (2016). He is currently the director of the international collaborative project We Hear You - A Climate Archive and the director of 77 Messages to the Future. He is also the artistic director of the theatre company Ensembleverket.

Fredrik Malmberg is Professor of Choral Conducting at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He often conducts the Swedish Radio Choir and the Eric Ericsson Chamber Choir. He works with music from all epochs but has a special interest in contemporary music, which is not least shown in his work with his own ensemble, Harmony of Voices.

Marta Dauliūtė is a Lithuanian director and producer based in Sweden since 2002. She holds a Master’s degree in film directing and production from the Valand Academy. She co-runs the production company MDEMC with Elisabeth Marjanović Cronvall and Elin Lilleman Eriksson, which was established in 2010. Recently, she has produced "The Building and Burning of a Refugee Camp" (2024) by Dennis Harvey and co-directed "Good Life" (2022) with Viktorija Šiaulytė, among other titles that have been featured at many international festivals.

Petra Bauer is an artist, filmmaker and professor in Film & Media at SKH, with a responsibility for the profile area Art, Technology and Materiality. In her artistic practice and research, she is interested in how we can approach film as a space for social and political explorations. Her work addresses how women organise, resist and refuse using both aesthetics and politics. She has formed long-term collaborations with several different feminist organisations, including Southall Black Sisters in London, the sex worker led organisation SCOT-PEP, Edinburgh and The Women’s Centre in Tensta-Hjulsta, Stockholm.

Kent Olofsson is professor of performing arts for the profile area Concept and Composition at SKH. He is a composer and an artist in the field of performing arts with an extensive artistic output that spans a broad range of genres, ensemble types, art forms and contexts. He received his PhD in artistic research at KMH in 2018 with “Composing The Performance”, a thesis that investigated the relation between text, acting and musical composition, collaborative methods in music theatre, and musical composition as a dramaturgical strategy.