Co-Curating Topographical Imaginaries

In April 2025, cultural geographer and PhD Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland began this three-year research project, which is supported by the New Carlsberg Foundation and carried out in a collaboration between Fuglsang Art Museum and the Departmentof Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen.

For many years, Emmy Laura has been particularly involved inlandscape and environmental history, cultural aspects of transition and environmental change, as well as environmental storytelling–topics she is exploring in greater depth with this research project.

As a society, we are facing radical changes of our surroundings, and this is affecting our fundamental ideas about landscapes and human’s role in them. Recent arthistorical research has revealed that visual arts has previously played an important role in shaping an ‘ideal’ Danish topography, and now this research project will query in to how museums can participate in the work of creating new andsustainable topographical imaginaries. The project therefore also research themes as loss and emergence, coexistence and uncertainty in landscape change, and takes a closer look at various futurisms unfolding in landscape management here on the edge of the future.

The projectis based on a participatory research-approach – hence the inclusion of ‘co-curating’ in the project title.

We will use landscape analysis and situated, multi-species, and collaborative methods to map and analyse the museum's regional landscapes. At the same time, we will develop and test landscap eimaginaries through dialogue with citizens and professionals and by involving the museum's collection as well as contemporary works that rethink the rural landscape inresponse to climate change, migration, colonialism, and environmental destruction, for example.

Overall, the project will prepare a research-based exhibition, produce landscape analysis and a series of sensory-realistic landscape scenarios, and build knowledge about forms of museum collaboration and processes with a focus on landscape transition and transformation.