Carrying the Cross of Creation

Carrying the Cross of Creation is the name of a project that arose from my doctoral artistic research at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

The project has been self-nominated for a REMA AWARD 2026 in the category Audience Engagement.

The following links lead to descriptions of the four stages of the project:

Sustainable practices

Carrying the Cross of Creation is designed to be sustainable from the inside out. Its sustainability arises from its content and execution, rather than a series of external add-ons.

— It encourages durable professional practices because it is rooted in the perceived needs of today’s audiences, working outwards from the local and the small-scale. It presents an alternative to the current mainstream, encouraging sustainanle contact between performer and performer, and performer and audience. It is not fixated on a notion of the future career of any one individual, but is interested in establishing and enriching contacts that are likely to develop over time.

— The project itself was first imagined as a “green”, climate-aware practice within a local music festival in the West of Sweden. It was not originally designed for touring, but its flexible format ensures that it could do so with ease. Its contents were digitally communicated in the local language (Swedish), and were summarised in English. Each of the projects events themselves had an inbuilt “green” perspective, which influenced their organisation and inspired their audiences.

— The remit of the Kalv festival as a whole was fully in line with society’s expectations for representation and diversity, but Carrying the Cross of Creation as a project within it (under the festival’s own subtitle De Sju Orden och de Sju Haydn / The Seven Words and the Seven Haydns) would have required extra funding in order to foreground these aspects over and above the musical/artistic content itself. Gender parity was always at the forefront of the festival’s aims, but was not specifically addressed by the project.

— The festival’s structure and its influence on the project were in themselves creative and international. To my knowledge there are no statistics to demonstrate the festival’s low carbon impact, but the concerts associated with the project were low-carbon.