Museums & Degrowth: How to create change towards a post-growth reality

Join us at the Nasjonalmuseet (National Museum in Oslo) on the 25th of June, as we come together with Kachun Lay, Françoise Vergès, Jérémie McGowan and Jina Chang for a panel discussion on the topic of ‘Museums & Degrowth: How to create change towards a post-growth reality’.

Museums and cultural institutions have been structured by their colonial roots and capitalist upbringing, and many, including museum professionals, feel frustration at the glacial, and often performative, change in museum practices in response to current crises. As part of the International Degrowth Conference’s Social & Cultural Programme we invite you to think together what Degrowth values might mean for practices of collecting and caring for heritage and communities involved.

Bringing artists, curators and conservators together, this session aims to unpick how the museum worker can bring the political and the emotional into the “apparently neutral” neo-liberal structure they work within. With a focus on how change occurs, the panel will explore where activism can sit alongside museum work, and how we can maintain hope and motivation and still care for ourselves as museum practitioners.

This event is being organized by Jina Chang (Nasjonalmuseet), Libby Ireland (University College London) and Ana Ribeiro (Tate) with the generous support of the Nasjonalmuseet.

Museums & Degrowth: How to create change towards a postgrowth reality will take place at the library of the National Museum, Oslo on the 25th of June 2015 from 18:00 until 19:30. Further details will be emailed to attendees closer to the date.

This is a free event with required booking. There is a limited capacity at the venue so tickets are limited. Please do attend if you book a space. You do not need to be registered for the International Degrowth Conference to attend this event.

Image: Folding Twisting Iron oxide Marble 1 by Kachun Lay (2023), 14 x 14 x 11 cm Gypsum, bone glue, pigments, lime. Photograph by Istvan Virag.

Participants' bios:

Jina Chang

Jina Chang is a time-based media art conservator at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo. Originally trained as a media artist (BFA Pratt Institute, MFA University of New Mexico), she later specialized in conservation at the University of Oslo. Her work spans the technical, ethical, and philosophical dimensions of preserving time-based and digital artworks. As both a practitioner and researcher, she interrogates the ontological and temporal complexity of conservation, with recent writings exploring artistic intention, affective labor, and the recursive act of re-creation. Her current research investigates the tensions between care and institutional structures, focusing on how preservation work can enact or resist neoliberal expectations. At the Nasjonalmuseet, she has led long-term projects documenting and developing preservation strategies for time-based media and digital art. Through the lens of degrowth, she is interested in rethinking conservation as a political and emotional practice of caring for cultural memory under shifting conditions.

Libby Ireland

Libby Ireland is a lecturer on the MSc in Conservation of Contemporary Art and Media at University College London which was established in 2023. Prior to this she was a Sculpture and Installations Conservator at Tate, London, from 2018-2024, where she focussed on new acquisitions into the collection. Libby worked on the Tate research project Reshaping the Collectible: When Artworks Live in the Museum from 2020-22, undertaking practice based research into the acquisition and display of works by Ima-Abasi Okon and Richard Bell. This work explored the collaborative process of bringing artworks into museum collections, examining the relationship between artist, artwork and museum. She has also undertaken research into modern materials, most recently developing documentation for acquisition of additively manufactured objects.

Kachun Lay

Kachun Lay’s practice is based around the processes of sculpture, performance art, and drawing. Rooted in studies of ecopsychology, philosophical posthumanism, and geology, he works with a transdisciplinary approach where his sculptures are treated as co-performing subjects. Other times, his body functions as a drawing tool. Lay investigates our relationships as human individuals to nature’s individuals and explores the communities that these relationships create; he ponders over what kind of 'spaces' these meetings may conjure. Through material exploration along with physical and virtual interaction, Lay tries to make work that seems to be in a hybrid-state between the natural and artificial realm. At the same time, he aims to explore the notion of “artificial” and argues that human beings are not disconnected from nature - neither mentally nor physically. Lay holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo and a master’s degree in Contemporary Art from Victorian College of Arts (VCA) in Melbourne. He has exhibited and performed extensively across Norway (Oslo, Bergen, Lillestrøm, Kristiansand, Lillesand, Frekhaug, Arendal) and Melbourne, Australia. He was selected along with 4 other artists to join the VCA ACCESS mentoring program under artist Benjamin Armstrong as his mentor.

Jérémie McGowan

Jérémie McGowan is a designer, artist, researcher and punk rock bassist based in Romsa / Tromsø. He exhibits, curates and teaches internationally. Originally from Wilmington, NC, USA, Jérémie has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2011). Together with Anne May Olli and RiddoDuottarMuseat in Kárášjohka, he is co-creator of the internationally acclaimed museum performance, Sámi Dáiddamuseax. He is recognized and merited nationally and internationally for his progressive leadership work as director of Northern Norway Art Museum from 2016–2020. He has previously been a senior curator at the National Museum (Oslo), as well as interim director of the PhD Program at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Jérémie is currently a postdoc researcher at UiT / The Arctic University Museum of Norway, working with themes linked to the restitution of Sámi cultural heritage. His current projects include Arctic Armpit, a one-man punk band launched in 2021, and Real. Arctic., a performative “tourist shop” created and produced together with Amund Sjølie Sveen / NORDTING in locations across the Arctic (Tromsø 2024, Kirkenes 2025, Svolvær 2025, and Anchorage 2026).

Ana Ribeiro

Ana Ribeiro is a Time-based media conservator at Tate (London). Ana studied Conservation and Restoration in Lisbon (FCT-UNL) and trained in media conservation at the S.M.A.K (Ghent), NiMK (Amsterdam) and Tate where she now coordinates the acquisition of new time-based media artworks joining the collection. Since 2016 Ana has been caring for performance-based artworks and their communities, such as Lee Mingwei’s Our Labyrinth, and recently she has focused on the preservation of choreographic works and the conditions to sustain them in a museum context, contributing to the project as Institutional Associate Researcher. Ana is interested in understanding how Degrowth principles can allow for a more reflective, just and responsible conservation practice in the museum.

Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès is a political theorist, curator and writer and currently Senior Fellow Researcher at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialization, UCL, London. She writes on the afterlife of slavery and colonization, decolonial feminism, the museum, and climate disaster and regularly works with artists. As Banister Fletcher Fellow for 2025, she is organising workshops on “Imagining the Post-Museum” with partner organisations Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Room, Cité internationale des arts, the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, and the University of London Institute in Paris. Vergès is the author of A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Decolonising the Museum.

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