ABOAGORA Research Retreat VIII: Repairing for Peace
The ABOAGORA Retreat VIII: Repairing for Peace invited MA Arts Students and Doctoral Researchers in the arts, humanities, and sciences to imagine peace at the time of accelerating militarisation. What kind of peace is promised by the securitisation of all aspects of everyday life? How to repair relations needed for peace as something other than a transactional, compromised or predetermined contract? The Retreat took place September 7–9 on the island of Seili in the Turku archipelago.
The current time of escalating conflicts over resources and reorganisation of the global axes of power urgently calls for solidarities between situated struggles. We are witnessing a steep reversal of the progress achieved in recent decades on both social justice and ecological protections. Militarisation as a deterrent against war is already a state of exception, a looming disaster for the environment and for democracy. It can only be countered by intersectional alliances between resistance movements that are now largely dispersed across generational, identitarian, cultural and geographical divides.
Focus on Peace
The ABOAGORA Retreat 2025 searched for imaginaries of peace that address the interconnections between societal and ecological breakdown across local and global scales. The Retreat set out to bring together research from different fields that critically and creatively examine militarisation and securitisation, historical and today’s peace movements, narratives of resistance to the languages and logics of war, collective practices that actively repair the ground for peace, or other related topics.
A multidisciplinary group of participants
After a record-breaking year for applications, we received fewer, 26 applications this time, and most of them came from Finland. Nevertheless, ten applicants from diverse backgrounds were chosen to participate in ABOAGORA Research Retreat in 2025.
The aim of the Retreat is to offer a momentary pause in habitual patterns and processes of practice, and a space to share, listen and reflect attentively together. The Retreat was directed by curator and researcher Taru Elfving (CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago), and the program featured also introduction to the Archipelago Research Institute and Art-Science collaboration in Seili by researcher Katja Mäkinen and artist Kalle Hamm.
The retreat participants discussed their work in a joint panel session on September 11 at the ABOAGORA: Venus, the Bringer of Peace event at the Sibelius Museum in Turku.
ABOAGORA is a meeting place for researchers and artists, an enabler of cooperation and a space for new creation. The project’s annual activities include an international three-day main event organized at the Sibelius Museum in Turku, a research retreat and open Avant Aboagora pre-events. The project launched in Turku’s capital of culture year 2011 is now a pioneer in the field of science and art cooperation. The event is based on the ethos that comprehensive problem solving requires not only interdisciplinary approach but also combining scientific and artistic perspectives. The organizers of ABOAGORA are the University of Turku, Åbo Akademi, Turku Academy of Arts, Åbo Akademi University Foundation and Turku University Foundation. In 2025 ABOAGORA was supported by the Kone Foundation, the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, Svenska Kulturfonden, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, William Thurings stiftelse and the Otto A. Malm Foundation.