UNDER THE STARS
2025
Public Art Commission / Social Sculpture / Video Installation
shared attention, collective reflection och temporary commons.
Under the Stars is a public artwork commissioned by the Swedish Public Art Agency (Statens konstråd) and Akademiska Hus in collaboration with Linköping University and The Posthumanities Hub as part of the university’s 50th anniversary.
Across two evenings, students, researchers, professors and university staff where invited to gathered outdoors on campus.
In silence, each participant lit a small fire, gradually forming a constellation of stars across the ground. Together these individual fires created a temporary shared space for collective knowledge, reflection and the existential questions carried by each participant. The fires became individual points of attention held within a larger constellation, where no single perspective could represent the whole.
Following the silent gathering, participants were invited to write freely in response to the experience, addressing their thoughts to the fire and the stars. These anonymous texts became part of a fifteen-minute video installation documenting the work. Rather than representing the event, the film allows many individual voices to form a collective reflection, weaving together personal experience into a shared narrative.
The work invited participants from across the university to meet outside their institutional roles, creating a temporary community in which silence, attention and shared presence becamet he primary forms of communication.