Line Marie Blok Thorsen

Short presentation

Anchored in environmental humanities, my research interests lie primarily at the intersection of eco-art history and environmental anthropology, with roots in science and technology studies (STS), environmental and pragmatic sociology, and aesthetic philosophy. My empirical focus is on climate and environmental activist art, landscape aesthetics and the transformative potential of agriculture in the green transition.

In my PhD thesis On the Margins of Eco-Art: Aesthetics, Ecology and Environmental Imaginations in East Asia, I examined the intersections between local ecological concerns, large-scale climate crises and environmental imaginations in East Asia through art and aesthetic practices. Specifically, I have explored how artists in Hong Kong and Japan have come to play a key role in mediating, anchoring and translating global climate change into locally relevant concerns by aesthetically and imaginatively engaging with everyday "eco-materials", such as culturally significant plants. Here, I followed groups of creative actors who, over two decades, have retrained as regenerative farmers to locally engage global environmental crises.

Since 2020 and until spring 2023, I have continued this work under the title Border-zones of Empire: Art, Ecology, and Negotiations of Territory in East Asia. Since the mid-2000s, an increasing number of artists in East Asia have transformed themselves into agrarian activists fighting for ecological and territorial belonging. In the shadow of ecological crises as well as past and present geopolitical tensions in the region, artist-farmers engage in imaginative and material struggles over who and what should live on and off the land. Sustainable agricultural practices serve to connect public concerns amidst post-, de- and re-colonial processes. In short, empirically and theoretically, I investigate how and why artist-run agriculture has emerged in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan as an important contemporary ecopolitical and aesthetic-imaginative form.

Current research

Imaginative Sustainabilities: Most recently, in my position at the University of Copenhagen, my research focuses on aesthetic agricultural practices in Denmark and in collaborations between Danish and East Asian actors. Here I tie together my past and present research and investigate the central role that different imaginative practices - including creative, artistic and aesthetic forms and engagements in both professional and amateur contexts - play in the negotiation, symbolic and material creation of a landscape in harmony with planetary boundaries. In other words, my research focuses on how different and situated forms of environmental aesthetics function as an important tool for ecological transformation of the agricultural landscape; from the monocultures of industrialized agriculture to new heterogeneous landscapes.

Primary fields of research

Environmental humanities
Environmental and climate art
Environmental Aesthetics
Environmental Anthropology
Landscape Aesthetics
Agricultural activism
Climate and art activism
Danish cultural and agricultural landscapes
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Japan

Previous projects/affiliations

Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), Aarhus University. PI Prof. Anna Tsing and Prof. Niels Bubandt

Changing Disasters, Copenhagen University. PI Prof. and prorector Kristian Cedervall Lauta

Methodological Cosmopolitanism: In the Laboratory of Climate Change, Ludwig-Maximillians University, Munich, Germany. PI Prof. Ulrich Beck

Links

https://cape.ku.dk

https://www.klimaogomstillingsraadet.dk/

Social Media 

https://ku-dk.academia.edu/LineMarieThorsen 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/line-marie-thorsen-10321112/

Other positions

(2022 -) Member of the Climate and Transition Council

(2023 -) Board member of Bureau for Listening 

CV

2022 (November) – present: Postdoc and deputy director, Center for Applied Ecological Thinking (CApE), Department of Cross Cultural and Regional Studies, Copenhagen University.

2021 (December) – 2022 (November): Parental leave 

2020 (May) ­– 2023 (March): DFF international post.doc. at Centre for Environmental Humanities and the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University and Ethnography Lab, School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Japan.

2015 (September) – 2019 (November 4): PhD at Art History and Anthropology, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Affiliated PhD at Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), PI prof. Anna Tsing and prof. Nils Bubandt, department of Anthropology. 

Dissertation: On the margins of eco-art – Aesthetics, plants and              environmental imaginations in East Asia.  

Adviser: prof. Jacob Wamberg (Art History) and prof. Heather                  Anne Swanson (AURA, Anthropology).

2017 (April 1-August 1): 50% leave of absence to curate exhibition and edit book Moving Plants (see below).

2016 (September) – 2016 (December): Visiting scholar at Center for Creative Ecologies, History of Arts and Visual Culture, University of California Santa Cruz, USA.

Advisors: prof. Anna Tsing (Anthropology) and prof. T.J. Demos (Art History and Visual Culture)

2014 (October) – 2015 (September): PhD-fellow at the ERC Advanced Grant research project Methodological Cosmopolitanism – in the Laboratory of Climate Change (Cosmo-Climate Research Project), PI Prof. Ulrich Beck (Sociology). Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich, Germany.

Advisor: prof. Ulrich Beck (Sociology) until January 1. 2015.[1]

2014 (October) – 2019 (November): Associated PhD-fellow at the research project Changing Disasters and Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE), University of Copenhagen Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research. PI prof. Kristian Cedervall Lauta (Law), Co-PI prof. Isak Winkel Holm (Arts and Cultural Studies).

2012 (October) – 2013 (June): Fieldwork in Japan for my Master Thesis.

2006 (September) – 2014 (January 15): Art History, BA and MA, University of Copenhagen and University of Lund, Sweden. MA-thesis: Acute Art Practices – The Mobilisation of Contemporary Art Practices for the Articulation of Public Concerns in the Wake of the Great North-eastern Japan Earthquake.  

MA Advisor: assoc. prof. Gunhild Borggreen (Art History and Visual Culture)

[1] Professor Ulrich Beck passed away on January 1^st, 2015, leading to the termination of the research project during the spring of 2015. At this point I applied for a PhD scholarship at Aarhus University.