From the ground, a vaulted figure. Through the centuries, a vessel. In place and in motion, a field hospital on the front lines of the climate crisis. A simple cabin or capsule, but at the same time a complex sculptural base station with ramifications in time and space. Solastalgia Pangolin is a temporary home for artistic refinement and contemplation regarding the state of the biosphere that is our eternal home.
Solastalgia Pangolin owns herself and runs herself in the form of a foundation. There are a few of us who helped to get her on her feet, that’s all. Maybe she is the one who helps us. She is her own legal agent and speaks freely to those who are prepared to listen, both now and in the troubled times to come.
It is not entirely correct to say that Solastalgia Pangolin is “off grid”. She is at the centre of the gigantic network of knowledge and care that has developed over the millennia of human being-in-nature, even though she is not connected to conventional contemporary infrastructure. She is equipped for basic habitation and built in a way that makes her easy to move. In her body she carries a library. It is the field hospital’s pharmacy. A collection of spiritual and intellectual medicine that is devised with the ability to grow and change in step with the requirements of future conditions.
For artists, writers, and others who work in and with the spirit, in and through the sensual, Solastalgia Pangolin will be a place to dwell for a period, a place for contemplation and profound thought regarding the role of the human in the contemporary state of nature. She will be free to use, like communal mountain cabins. First, she will appear in her becoming in Gnesta, in Sörmland, an area whose forest has been devastated by the spruce bark beetle and elm death in recent years, and whose eutrophic coast and lakes are suffering from algae ravages. She will then be officially born in The english park, one of Sweden’s oldest arboretums in Uppsala during ESEH Conference 2025. After that she will be dismantled to be reassembled in another ecocritical place, and after that, into eternity, in others.
Solastalgia is a concept that describes the sadness and fear that arises at the thought that humans have had an irreversible impact on the world, ours, that surrounds us.
The Pangolin, or anteater, is an ancient animal (now endangered) that bears an exoskeleton of scales. Such a movable and eternally conscious exterior constitutes a structure for the work that we must undertake in order to be able to process our capacity for a relationship with, and a love for, the future, and also the nature of the future itself.
Solastalgia pangolin was conceived by the duo Rören/Johannessen consisting of artists Signe Johannessen and Erik Rören www.rorenjohannessen.se
The permanent librarion of Biblioteca pangolina is Axel Andersson.
Current location
August 1-18, 2025 constructed at Art Lab Gnesta
August 19-21, 2025 at The English Park, Uppsala University.
- August 21 at 12:30 – 14:30 Communal Workshop: Engaging in embroidery and branding techniques creating patterns for posterity
- August 21 at 17:30 – 19:00 Formal inauguration and joint cooking and shared dining fest of eternity oriented exoskeletons and reading from the inhouse apothecary library.