Just Low-Carbon Mobility Transitions: A Research-Based Art Exhibition

Abstract

While research on just low-carbon energy transitions is advancing, its manifestation in the cultural domain remains limited. This chapter features analytical and aesthetic interplay by narrating the process and outcome of a co-production process at the intersection of future imaginaries of mobility, salvage frontiers, and energy systems in transformation. It mainframes a rich tapestry of co-produced art by the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy. This accompanied a book workshop convened by the Energy Anthropology Network at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Autumn 2021, with images from two exhibitions interspersed in thematic play with nine book chapters. Drawing on the experience of the Just Mobility Transitions Network in Norway, the chapter offers reflective insights on the process through which these research-based, socially engaged art interventions came about.

The biannual workshop of the Energy Anthropology Network kicked off on 22 August 2021 with the launch of a co-produced art exhibition by Rjukan Solarpunk Academy, as part of the Norwegian Just Mobility Transitions Network (JUSTMOBNET) funded by the University and College Network for Western Norway. Like this book which began with a call for abstracts circulated by the Energy Anthropology Network in late 2020, the art exhibition was many months in the making. Several JUSTMOBNET members visited Rjukan, the darkest valley in Norway surrounded by looming mountains, in early March 2021, when the sun had not yet shone onto the city that year. Except in the town hall square, where the sun mirror mounted by Martin Andersen on a mountain top reflected sunlight into Rjukan. Along with textile artist Margrethe Brekke, he established the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy in 2019, and this collaboration with JUSTMOBNET marked one of the institution’s early projects, in line with the artists’ tradition of engaging with research as a companion to artistic inspiration.

In late May 2021, Brekke and Karin Coenen visited Siddharth Sareen and the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger, to study the proposed exhibition site and delve into the theme of the collaboration. Sareen shared insights from the Joint Programming Initiative Climate financed project ‘Responsive Organising for Low Emission Societies’ (ROLES), as part of which his team had been studying just urban low-carbon transitions in the rapidly digitalising transport sector in Norway. Coenen drew on her curatorial background as she and Brekke held discussions with Björn Lindberg and Anja Fremo as the museum’s thematic and communication expert advisors. This was followed by Brekke interviewing other members of the ROLES team in Norway, including Devyn Remme, Håvard Haarstad and Katinka Wågsæther in Bergen, before she and Andersen set to work over the summer in Rjukan to create the exhibition.

What transpired were twin complementary exhibitions. Andersen took point of departure in an old fossil fuel car he had patched up, that finally broke down over the Haukeli mountain pass in Spring 2021. In Rjukan, he worked with hundreds of kilograms of car spare parts in tactile engagement with the salvage frontier of automobility. This manifested in a reimagining of car remnants in another setting altogether, namely on an oil rig that comprises part of the Norwegian Petroleum Museum building. A meta-comment on the tight historical link between petroleum as a commodity and the automobile as a technology, this became the exhibition ‘Uro’, a Norwegian play on words meaning both ‘restless’ and a ‘mobile’ object in suspended animation. With Norway being a global leader in the transition to electric cars (with the highest per capita rate), this clustered suspension of old car components invited the audience into a space for deep reflection, standing out on the oil rig gazing out at the Ryfylke fjord with the water glittering below the mesh floor, while the spare parts clanged in the breeze.

Meanwhile, Brekke was captivated by the idea of a National Association of Bus Users, which arose from Remme’s work on the ROLES project and led to the actual founding of a civil society organisation by this name (in Norwegian: Bussbrukernes Landsforening). As Brekke engaged with the solarpunk notion of a manifesto for such an organisation to advance the interests of bus users as a vulnerable group of mobility sector stakeholders, she became acutely conscious of her own conditioning. She wondered why she—herself unlikely to buy a luxury electric car—had read the biography of Elon Musk who led the electric car manufacturer Tesla, but had not even heard of the world’s largest electric bus manufacturers, such as Yutong, Build Your Dreams (BYD) and Van de Leegte (VDL). This sparked a foray into the history of electric buses, including their technical specifications, iconic examples such as Bogota’s bus rapid transit system, and supply to Norwegian cities. Brekke assembled these details through evocative hand-drawn visuals and scribbles on to a tapestry of old lampshade material from a shutdown factory in Rjukan, a nod to the post-industrial legacy of the setting in which this exhibition took shape, in strong resonance with Andersen’s poignant portrayal of the end of an era.

These five textiles enveloped walls in various parts of the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, juxtaposed with its sleek interiors and solid industrial infrastructures, blending into the background yet simultaneously standing out as the materialisation of something different. Along with these textiles, Brekke foregrounded a propaganda-style announcement of the National Association of Bus Users, to symbolise the possibility of meaningful engagement with the challenge of transitioning to a just low-carbon mobility future.

Each of this book’s nine chapters is followed by an image drawn from this exhibition by the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy. The first four images feature the process and details of Martin Andersen creating Uro, and capture a sense of its assembled version on the oil rig in Stavanger. The next three images begin with the assembling of research-based details about bus users at Rjukan Solarpunk Academy, followed by technical details of electric bus types, and an emphasis on the meaning of ‘omnibus’ as ‘for all’, accompanied by scribbled principles for a solarpunk manifesto of the National Association for Bus Users. The final two images comprise overview shots of some of the textiles Margrethe Brekke placed within the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, draping its walls with varied colours to enable the condensation of ideas about things to come. Future imaginaries, salvage frontiers and energy systems in transformation are concerns shared by the Rjukan Solarpunk Academy and the chapters in this book, hence these aesthetic and analytical interventions feature complementary interplay. Exhibition Fig. 2 follows this chapter.

Exhibition Fig. 2

(Source David Odell [used with permission])

Detail of a car spare part that became a component of ‘Uro’