What does it mean for the world to end? Does it end in the same way for all? And might it have already ended for some? During the summer and autumn of 2019 the art collective SUPERFLEX flooded Cisternerne, an exhibition space for contemporary art in the abandoned underground water reservoirs of Copenhagen, and invited visitors into a dark, post-apocalyptic world. The title of the exhibition was It’s not the End of the World, and in this podcast-episode Line Henriksen from the Monster Network met with independent artist Katja Aglert, PhD candidate Ida Hillerup Hansen and postdoctoral researcher Marietta Radomska in the cold dark depths of Copenhagen to discuss the (non)ending of the world.

About the researchers and artists of this episode:

Katja Aglert is an independent artist whose practice is transdisciplinary in nature, and includes both individual and collaborative projects. She is an executive board member of The Seed Box, an international environmental humanities collaboratory headquartered at Linköping University. She teaches regularly at Umeå Art Academy, and Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design.

Ida Hillerup Hansen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Gender Studies at Central European University in Budapest and currently a visiting researcher at Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. Their research explores embodied experience of loss through a lens of contemporary grief discourse and feminist poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories of mourning.

Marietta Radomska, PhD, is a Postdoc at the Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University, and Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki. Her current research focuses on ecologies of death in the context of contemporary art. She is the author of the monograph Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016), and has published in Australian Feminist Studies, Somatechnics, Angelaki, and Women, Gender & Research, among others. Queer Death Studies Network website: https://queerdeathstudies.net/ |The Posthumanities Hub website: https://posthumanities.net/

Monster Talks is a podcast series that explores the figure of the monster and the concept of the monstrous as important thinking tools for addressing dynamics of power, inclusion and exclusion, discrimination and violence. The podcast is made possible by the support of Nordic Culture Point and produced by The Monster Network in collaboration with Network for Gender Studies at UiS. All episodes are available from the podcast’s website at UiS.

Artwork by Joanne Teresa Taylor, NettOp, University of Stavanger.