How to Listen to a Mountain

A Symposium at Skaftfell Art Center

November 7 · 10:30–17:00

Dinner at 19:00 · Skaftfell Bistro

How to Listen to a Mountain is an intimate, one-day gathering centred around Strandatindur, developed as part of Julie Lænkholm’s practice-based PhD research.

Taking the mountain as a point of departure, the symposium brings together different forms of knowledge, experience, and artistic practice to explore our relationships with the natural world.

Through geology, climate science, local memory, embodied knowledge, art history, walking, music, filmmaking, and collective storytelling, we will listen to the mountain, the fjord, the river, the weather, the soil, and the people who live alongside them.

Rather than approaching the mountain as an object to be studied, the gathering asks what it might mean to listen to a landscape — and to recognise the knowledge held within it.

Programme

10:30 · Arrival and Welcome

Tea made with plants from Strandatindur and freshly baked croissants.

An exhibition by local queer artists Ra Tack and Bella Podpadec will be open throughout the day, forming part of the symposium’s shared space.

10.30 – 12.15 

Introduction by Julie Lænkholm 
Practice-based PhD research
PASS / Niels Bohr Institute

Discussions with locals and visiting guests with topics such a: Listening through geology and monitoring; personal stories from the fjörd; embodied fjord practice; climate change, positive tipping points, and the possibility of transformative environmental action;

12.15-13.15 Lunch at Skaftfell Bistro.

13.15 – 15.15
Discussions continue with topics such as: Landscape, art history, and anti-monumental ractice; conversation about landscape, artistic representation, and the ways in which art can shape, question, and transform our relationships with place; exploration of weather as lived experience, inherited knowledge, and daily observation.

15:15 · Walking with the Mountain

A collective walk on the hillside of Strandatindur.

Walking as a way of listening, observing, and encountering the mountain through movement, attention, and bodily experience.

17:00 · Closing

19:00 · Dinner at Skaftfell Bistro 

An informal gathering to continue conversations and share reflections from the day.

How to Listen to a Mountain is an invitation to consider how knowledge is formed through attention, proximity, memory, and care.

By bringing scientific, artistic, embodied, and local perspectives into conversation, the symposium asks how we might move beyond understanding landscape as something separate from ourselves — and begin to recognise it as something we are part of.

The program and lunch is for free but we ask that you register your attendance by writing us at skaftfell@skaftfell.is including your name, phone number and dietary preferences.