These Relations Are Forever at the 7th Nordic STS conference in Stockholm

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These Relations Are Forever, the four-channel video installation by artist Jemma Woolmore, was presented at the 7th Nordic STS Conference 2025, held in Stockholm on June 11-13, 2025

The work brings a topic that usually stays confined to technical reports, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) and their long-term presence in bodies and ecosystems, into a public, multi-disciplinary setting.

About the installation

These Relations Are Forever is a 36-minute installation that explores how endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) move through agriculture, law, policy, bodies, and water. Four researchers, positioned at different points along this flow, perform rituals they personally developed, combining scientific practices with movement, spoken text, symbolic objects, and specific locations. The four screens face each other, allowing the rituals to intersect and emphasising how chemical exposure connects disciplines, bodies, and ecosystems.

Ritual in the project is not decorative but a way to slow down scientific practice and reflect on the sources and impacts of data. It creates space to acknowledge the entanglement of humans and more-than-human systems, to explore care, fertility, and community, and to celebrate the restorative capacities of bodies and ecosystems while remaining grounded in the realities of EDC contamination.

About the SciArt Collaboration

The installation is the outcome of an eighteen-month art–science collaboration supported by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) through the SciArt Resonances IV – NaturArchy programme. The group first met during the SciArt Summer School on NaturArchy at the JRC in June 2022, which became the starting point for a long-term exchange between artistic and scientific practices.

The project brings together media artist Jemma Woolmore, originally from New Zealand and now based in Berlin, whose work with moving image, sound and installation often addresses ecological and social transformations, and four researchers whose fields map the trajectory of chemicals through society and the environment. 

Caterina Cacciatori, an environmental engineer at the JRC, focuses on water management; Sandra Coecke, also at the JRC, is a toxicologist working on food safety and One Health; Irene Guerrero Fernández, a JRC geoinformatician and agricultural ecologist, studies how chemicals interact with landscapes and ecosystems; and Saskia Vermeylen, legal anthropologist at Strathclyde University, investigates environmental law and its social implications.