Sensing energy transition

Sensing energy transition is an exhibition that explores how people experience the sounds, textures, and atmospheres of energy transition. The exhibition showcases work from Living with Energy Transition, a collaborative project focused on a series of public soundwalks by artist Maja Zećo.

The soundwalks focused on St. Fittick’s Park in Torry, Aberdeen – a site partially earmarked for development as an energy transition zone. Sound walking is a practice of listening while walking. Each walk was an artwork involving careful attention to the park and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Participants followed specific routes that drew attention to the diverse sounds emanating from different features around the park and travelling across it.

Energy transition is often presented as a pathway to a sustainable future. The soundwalks uncovered a more complicated story – one where the promise of economic opportunity goes hand in hand with a reordering of environments, ways of knowing, and practices of care and belonging. Sensing energy transition explores how this unsettling of lived experience is sensed in different ways. It comprises a new body of artistic work informed by the soundwalks, alongside ephemera and photographic documentation. These works are not simply documentation but reflecting multiple experiences of listening to St Fittick's Park, thus revealing new perspectives on energy transition as an uneven, contested and lived process.

The exhibition has been realised, over the past two years, through a dialogue between anthropology and the arts. Through practice-based research, the team have developed ways of thinking, making, and creating knowledge that contribute to their respective fields as well as engage with sound beyond established disciplinary frames.

More about this exhibition

Sensing energy transition is organised by LSE Anthropology in association with LSE Arts and funding from the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund.

The exhibition emerges from an interdisciplinary project 'Living with Energy Transition' involving anthropologist Gisa Weszkalnys, urbanist William Otchere-Darko, curator Rachel Grant, and artist-researcher Maja Zećo in collaboration with community partner Friends of St. Fittick's Park. Visual artist Phoebe McBride documented the soundwalks through photographs.

The soundwalks built on insights from earlier qualitative research by Otchere-Darko and Weszkalnys, which examined the ambivalent and critical local response to the proposed Aberdeen energy transition zone. The soundwalks were open to the public, with participants including both Torry residents who knew the site intimately and first-time visitors. We are grateful to participants for allowing us to share their notes and reflections as part of the exhibition.

The project has resulted in a publication, Living with Energy Transition - Soundwalks in Words (2024) that examines soundwalking as a critical and collaborative form of enquiry. It was also featured in LSE's magazine Research for the World.

The project has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/S011080/1), the Department of Anthropology at LSE, and the LSE Engagement and Partnerships Fund. Community partner Friends of St Fittick’s Park were remunerated via funds provided by the transdisciplinary working group ‘Intersecting Energy Cultures’ (The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, the Kleinman Centre for Energy Policy, University of Pennsylvania, and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, University of Edinburgh).

During the exhibition the team will be hosting Sensing transition: arts methodologies and the politics of energy futures, an interdisciplinary workshop inviting artists, activists, and researchers to reflect on what sensory approaches can do: how they might sense the energy transition otherwise and imagine energy futures beyond technical narratives.

About the project team

Rachel Grant (Fertile Ground) is a freelance curator based in Aberdeen. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary projects, place-based approaches and post-extractive practice. Recent work is framed by petroculture (the social relations shaped by our use and dependency on oil), energy transition and a Just Transition.

Phoebe McBride is a multidisciplinary visual artist and creative practitioner based in Aberdeen, Scotland. Her practice uses fiction as a method to explore real, imagined and inaccessible spaces.

Gisa Weszkalnys is Associate Professor in Anthropology at LSE. Her research explores future making as a political, material, and imaginative practice, for example, in the context of city planning, emerging oil economies, and the transition to a low-carbon society.

Maja Zećo is a practice-based artist researcher exploring identities and listening in spaces of socio-political tensions and post-conflict areas. Her sound and performance pieces have been presented internationally, and her writing was published in Organised Sound (Cambridge University Press) and Journal of Sonic Studies (Leiden University Press).

Friends of St Fittick's Park aim to protect St Fittick’s Park and the adjacent green areas from the Aberdeen ETZ development. They celebrate the park as a place to be used and enjoyed by people living in Torry and Aberdeen and collaborate with other action groups in the region to improve the park and its biodiversity.

William Otchere-Darko (Newcastle University) is an urbanist with an interdisciplinary interest in energy, environmental politics and planning practices. The exhibition team would like to acknowledge William's contributions to the organisation of the soundwalks.

Related Events

Research showcase talk with Dr Gisa Weszkalnys
Date: Tuesday 3 February, 1pm-1.30pm
Venue: Room LG.03, Parish Hall, LSE Campus

Dr Gisa Weszkalnys will be opening the winter research showcase series of coffee-break research talks by discussing the Sensing energy transition exhibition and exploring how arts-based methodologies can help us better understand the lived experience of energy transition. This event is free to attend and open to the LSE community. Register here to book your place.

From time to time there are changes to event details so we strongly recommend that if you plan to attend this exhibition you check back on this listing before visiting.

LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.