Caroline Ektander
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Caroline Ektander is a Swedish architect and environmental humanities researcher investigating how extractive societies produce and sustain uneven distributions of environmental harm and the epistemic, political, and material arrangements through which those distributions persist. Since 2018, she has developed Toxic Commons, a transdisciplinary research programme exploring the elusive dynamics of toxicity and the structures that sustain it. The programme holds together interconnected lines of inquiry into environmental phenomena that are marked by ambiguity, resistant to straightforward explanation, and yet productive of profoundly unequal burdens for particular bodies and landscapes.
Her practice-based PhD, Toxic Commons: Transmediating Permanent Pollution (Bauhaus University Weimar, 2026), grew out of this research programme. Taking the environmental aftermath of German reunification as its empirical point of departure, the dissertation examined a constitutive paradox of extractive societies: although pollution persisted materially, environmental remediation often rendered it politically and sensorially absent. Grounded in long-term collaborative artistic research conducted across remediated landscapes in former East Germany, the dissertation developed transmediation as a mode of inquiry, revealing how remediation functioned not only as a practice of environmental repair but also as a technology of containment, producing epistemological vanishing acts around the more elusive manifestations of pollution.
Ektander writes, lectures, and teaches on toxicity, pollution, extraction, and environmental justice. Her work has appeared in Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press) and in special issues of Lagoonscape: The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, Urban Studies (SAGE), and HUB -Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society. Her doctoral research was supported by the Thüringer Graduiertenförderung (3+1 years), while her artistic and curatorial projects have received additional support from the Andrea von Braun Stiftung and, on several occasions, the Kreativfonds at Bauhaus University Weimar. In 2022, together with artist Stephan Thierbach, she received the tandem fellowship Landschaft als Ort der Transformation, awarded by the German Environment Agency (UBA) in collaboration with the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and OSTEN Festival.
Ektander is a co-founder of the art-science platform Toxic Commons (2018–), together with Antonia Alampi (Spore Initiative), Simone Müller (University of Augsburg), and the Hazardous Travels research cluster (Ayushi Dhawan, Maximilian Feichtner, and Jonas Stuck). She also collaborates with filmmaker Hendrik Löbbert through Nonfiction Society, developing documentary film projects engaging questions of knowledge, science, and society.
Upcoming
Guest Researcher (Sep-Dec) at Environmental Humanities Laboratory, KTH, Stockholm
CV
2025
Toland, Alexandra. Ektander, Caroline. Jasper, Sandra. “Mediating Alterlife: Arts-based research on the ecological labour of plant succession at a contaminated site in Bitterfeld-Wolfen” Urban Studies Journal special issue: Temporalities of Urban Natures. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251383781
2025
Ektander, Caroline.”Subterranean Reverberations and the Horror of the Chemical Sublime” Lagoonscapes special issue: Cracking the surface : flows between above and below ground” http://doi.org/10.30687/LGSP/2785-2709/2025/01/005
2024
Ektander, Caroline. Rossée, Carlina, Al-Qaisi, Jasmina. “The Black Triangle: Commoning Borderland Coal Ecologies” HUB Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society https://doi.org/10.22501/hub.2806768
2023
Ektander, Caroline. Stuck, Jonas. “Redistribute Toxicity : An Artistic Intervention into the legacy of the German Toxic Waste Trade.” Environmental Humanities Duke press Volume 16:2 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10746012
2026
Ektander, C. (forthcoming). "Der Schweiß der Erde (Sweat of the Earth): On Memory and the Entanglements with Land". In Vaage, N. S. Bauer, S. & Münster, D. (Eds.), Liveable Soils through Technologies of Care: Rethinking Remediation in the Anthropocene. Leuven University Press.
2022
Ektander, C.“How to live with Toxicity” in Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Bittner, R. Errázuriz, M. Rattalino, E. & Shedde, S. (Eds.) Vegetation under Power, Bauhaus Taschenbuch 29: 74-76
2022
Ektander, C.“Do We Live in Heritage?” in Show Hidden Objects, Jour Fixe: Neuwerk Magazine 9: 109-117
2021
Interview with Toxic Commons: All in This Toxic Mess Together. With Dhawan, A. Ektander, C. Mueller, S. Finesso, A. & Klassen, L. Soapbox Journal, 2.0 CONTAMINATION: 217-236
2019
Ektander, C. ‘Disrupting Toxic Narratives – in Order to Find Space to Act’, in Alampi, A. (Eds.) Deadly Affairs, Extra City Cahier 5: 34-44
2026
Talk: Transmediation - A Spatial Methodology for Engaging Permanent Pollution, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm
2026
Talk: Methodological Impasse of Toxicity Toxic Heritage Ruhr, Bochum
2025
Talk: Toxic commons Reclaim Air Symposium Current Festival, Stuttgart
2025
Talk: Transmediation at Sensing the Environment workshop, Environmental Humanties Hub, KTH, Stockholm
2024
Lecture performance together with Artist Anna Zett Dragon Burrow/Drachenbau, OSTEN Festival
2024
Performance panel The Black Triangle at Leakage Conference, TU Dresden
2023
Keynote conversation 'Misplacing matter? Vertical practices and (hi)stories of space and power', with Livia Cahn and Simone Müller, Augsburg University
2023
Tandem lecture with Prof.Simone Müller 'The Distribution of Environmental Burdens - On the local and global pathways of toxicity' Global Challenges Lecture Series, Darmstadt Technical University
2023
Talk 'Transmediating Toxicity' at Seminar series 'Shared Wastelands' European Media Studies, Potsdam
2023
Talk 'Toxic Commons' together with Mia Yu, Fluid Toxicity, Floating University
2022
Tandem lecture with Prof.Alexandra Toland 'Himmel im Boden' Lecture series 'Down to earth', TU Dresden
2021
Talk 'Toxic Legacies', Chemical (Re)Actions, Goethe Institute, Chicago
2021
Talk 'Toxicity and Breath at 'Vegetation under power'' Symposium, BAUHAUS Stiftung Dessau
2020
Moderator of interdisciplinary panel 'Oceans and Waste', Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig
2020
Talk 'Redistribute Toxicity' at seminar series 'Hidden Flows - the production of invisible Territories', Royal Academy of Fine Art, Copenhagen
2020
Talk 'Toxicity' at 'TOXIC! Symposium', HEAD Genève, Geneva
2019
Talk 'The impossibility of an Island', Deadly Affairs Public Program, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerpen