Finnish artist Jenna Sutela is featuring in the Swiss Institute's curatorial initiative Spora, which has it’s opening on May 10th. Her earth battery-powered oracle will be on show, amongst other artwork in the project.

Spora is centered in the Swiss Institute’s institutional imperative to integrate environmental consciousness and climate action into all facets of the institution. Unfolding and growing over the course of the next several years, the initial artworks in the project will be on long-term view in the non-gallery spaces of the Swiss Institute.

The artworks at the core of Spora are accompanied by the institution’s initial steps towards climate action, begun in 2022, which take form as a thorough analysis of SI’s carbon emissions through transport, travel, energy, and other ecological and social factors, and a plan of actions developed with the entire SI team for reducing the institution’s  environmental impact. SI will publish and share this process with the hopes to sprout inspiration and collaboration across institutional boundaries. Spora is conceived as an open-ended approach, which acknowledges that this is a continuous project that will generate more questions than answers. It is an attempt to germinate change while acknowledging context and limitations, with the understanding that this process is imperfect but urgent.

Spora and the accompanying event series, These Seasons, as well as the institutional initiatives of climate action, propose a start to a morphing process of reflection and transformation.