In 2025, curator and consultant Rikke Bank developed the visual research project Curating Regeneration in collaboration with Frame Contemporary Art Finland and the Sustainable Visual Arts Network. At its core lies a simple but urgent question: How do cultural organisations hold together in times of change? In Frame’s blog, she shares the reflections and findings that emerged along the way.
Curating Regeneration – Reflections from a Changing Field, 2025.
Curatorial Inquiry
Through zine-making, conversations, and workshop-based inquiry, Curating Regeneration explores regeneration as a curatorial methodology. Rooted in Nordic approaches that understand the curatorial as a mode of inquiry, the project extends this perspective into the organisational sphere, treating institutions themselves as potential sites of artistic, relational, and ecological practice.
In this framing, curation is not only the presentation of art but also the careful tending of relationships, rhythms, and responsibilities within cultural ecosystems. It becomes a way of noticing how organisations collaborate, how they hold complexity, and how they sustain themselves over time.
The workshops developed for the Sustainable Visual Arts Network and for Frame’s Sustainability Day were central to this inquiry. Drawing on conversation and art-based methods such as material engagement, visualisation, and collective reflection, they created conditions for participants to surface insights into organisational life, its fragilities, and its regenerative possibilities.
Rikke Bank’s workshop for Frame’s Sustainability Day in November, 2025.
From Sustainability to Regeneration
The notion of sustainability is often traced back to the Brundtland Commission’s 1987 definition: meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Today, sustainability is a familiar framework within cultural policy and practice in the Nordic countries, as highlighted in a recent report.
Yet in my earlier research, many cultural workers expressed a growing interest in regenerative approaches. While sustainability often focuses on adaptation and harm reduction, regeneration emphasises creating the conditions that allow human, organisational, and ecological life to continually renew itself.
Although regeneration is most commonly associated with agriculture, the concept has begun travelling into new domains. Publications such as Regenerative Leadership by Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins have helped catalyse this shift. Rather than treating regeneration as a fixed or universal definition, I approached it as a concept in motion—something that shifts, stretches, and gathers new meanings as it moves across fields. This stance, inspired by Mieke Bal’s notion of travelling concepts, allowed the project to remain methodologically open and to evolve through workshops, conversations, and collaborative experiments.
From the outset, the project was also shaped by Cecilie Ullerup Schmidt’s notion of the aesthetics of production, which highlights the often-invisible labour, emotional intensity, and relational care embedded in cultural work. Ullerup criticises how dominant capitalist art-world narratives, centred on productivity and the myth of the isolated “artistic genius,” tend to overshadow the quieter processes of maintenance, repair, and support that make cultural production possible. These undervalued practices resonate strongly with regenerative thinking.
Curating Regeneration – Reflections from a Changing field, 2025. Photo: Hanna Tokaj
Practising Regeneration Through Making
Earlier this year, my sister taught me how to make paper from recycled egg trays. This simple technique became the project’s material foundation: breaking things down and slowly forming them into something new. The stitching and assembling of the zine grew from the same impulse. Over time, both papermaking and hand-sewing became meditative gestures. Their repetitive rhythms offered slowness, grounding, and a tactile way of thinking during a period marked by personal grief and uncertainty. In this way, the making was never separate from the research; it became a method in itself—an embodied attempt to practise the regeneration the project seeks to understand.
This slow craft approach also shaped the project’s visual language. As I began running this semester, I found myself tuning into the small systems around me: the raindrop pattern on Helsinki’s manhole covers, the shifting seasonal light, the chance encounters that punctuated daily life. These impressions, too, seeped into the work.
The zine’s materials carry their own regenerative histories. The blue textile is repurposed from an earlier exhibition I curated, and the plastic sheets are collected waste from food consumed during the research period. Together, these fragments form a small ecosystem, held together by care, attention, and the ongoing question of how to renew what we already have.
Imagining Regenerative Futures
Resisting the lure of quick fixes, the project turns toward Donna Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble. It attends to the complex, entangled realities shaping cultural work today: financial precarity, burnout, political shifts, and ongoing negotiations around fairness, care, and sustainability. Through this lens, regeneration becomes both speculative and grounded—a way to imagine alternative futures while staying alert to the frictions and vulnerabilities of the present.
The nine collages in the zine, made by the Frame team, reflect this approach. Each one sketches a possible future through small gestures of care, collaboration, and attunement. Rather than presenting answers, the collages open space: invitations to think, to question, and to imagine what a regenerative cultural field might look and feel like.
Curating Regeneration remains an ongoing process that invites artists, cultural workers, institutions, and audiences to explore how the cultural field might regenerate itself from within, fostering care, renewal, and long-term sustainability.
Read and Visit
The zine is available digitally and is also featured in the exhibition We’re Working Here!, on view at Oodi Helsinki Central Library from 11 December 2025 to 10 January 2026.
Share Your Reflections with Me
The zine gathers fragments from a cultural sector in motion: reflections on organisational challenges, invisible care work, speculative visualisations, and a small reflection tool as an invitation to think along the yellow stitches.
If you wish to share thoughts, questions, or your own experiences of working with regeneration, you are warmly invited to send them to curatingregeneration@gmail.com. Reflections shared with me will inform my thesis next semester.
Rikke Bank. Photo: Pauliina Kallio / Frame Contemporary Art Finland
Rikke Bank is a curator and consultant working between Helsinki and Copenhagen. Her practice explores curating in an expanded field, with a focus on participatory methodologies, regenerative thinking, and cultural ecologies. She collaborates with organisations, artists, and communities to develop projects that foster dialogue, shared inquiry, and socially engaged forms of learning.
She holds a BA in Art History from the University of Copenhagen and an MA in Leadership for Sustainability from Malmö University, and is currently completing the Nordic Master in Visual Studies and Art Education at Aalborg University and Aalto University. Recent collaborations include Naturkraft (Ringkøbing, Denmark), Villa Kultur (Copenhagen, Denmark), and TaM (Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria). In 2021, she co-founded the collaborative platform Along Projects.
– Rikke Bank, Curator and consultant
This blog is a platform for reflecting on work, current issues, and discussions in the arts by Frame staff members and other contributors. This blog post is published in English.