The time of The Dissolution

We are living in a time of great transformation. The world we have built is, socially, environmentally, and individually, in the process of dissolving. What is to come is beyond our ability to intellectually grasp or, for that matter, comprehend. I see this as one of the powers art has to offer. To venture into the unknown and dare to remain in not knowing is, for many artists, an opening to the creative possibility of forming new images and new words to describe the life that is coming into being. With the help of imagination, creating new images and thoughts with which we can clothe tomorrow is a need we, as humanity, must continually recover. When a system has become rigid and lost its elasticity, there is a need for the courage to throw oneself out of the safety the system offers, in order to search for the unforeseen images that lie hidden in the state of not-knowing.

In the years during and after my master’s degree in architecture in 2024, I developed a concept I call “daring to remain in the Time of Dissolution.” The Time of Dissolution can be seen as a parallel to the Enlightenment, which I believe came to an end with the Second World War. Thinkers like Camus realised that visions of a better tomorrow had reached their end, and that only the absurd could contain the pain of a human longing for rationality in the irrational reality of life. The capitalism we unleashed after the world wars has, to some extent, managed to intoxicate us and produce enough abundance—thanks to an apparently endless supply of fossil energy—to offer some sort of substitute for meaning-making. But with global heating and, in the view of many, the collapse of capitalism in 2008, we have lived in a time of decay where we have also lacked the will for the utopian vision-making of the Enlightenment.

Many argue that we need new images to gather around, that we need to sharpen our pens and rally around new visions. And there is probably much truth in that perspective. But there is another direction in “standing in the Time of Dissolution”: to let the old fall, and as a society, seize the opportunity to stand in the fall and in uncertainty, so as not to remain trapped in the structure we have already lost. In the Time of Dissolution, we can let the concepts and certainties on which we have built our world dissolve; in dissolution, there is no final solution that would give us paradise on earth. Dissolution does not come with answers to our thirsty longing for rationality. The Time of Dissolution, like a compost, breaks down the components with which we have built society to make room for new life. Like the caterpillar in its cocoon, allowing itself to dissolve into a pulpy mass of cells in the transformation into a butterfly, there is a trust—or call it love—in dissolution.

Making Words to Earth - Ord till Jord