Past Lectures & Literary Events 2010
Jean Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland
Lecture by Dr. Glenda Goss
Tuesday, February 23, 6:30 pm
$10 ($8 ASF Members; FREE to students with a valid ID)
Composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) came to prominence during Finland’s golden age of the arts. The timing was no coincidence, for Sibelius helped to shape that golden era while in turn being shaped by it. In her talk, Dr. Glenda Dawn Goss, teaches at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and a former Professor of Musicology at the University of Georgia, will present this national creative tide in the context of Nordic cultural currents and will discuss the vital importance of the wider Nordic world for the creation of that display. The events of Finland’s golden age were fueled by wider geo-political forces in the course of which Finland came under Russian control after centuries of being a part of Sweden. The push and pull of east and west spurred Sibelius and his contemporaries to create a dazzling outpouring of music, art, drama, and literature that endowed Finns with a sense of pride, awakened them to their unique heritage, and defined what it meant to be Finnish.
Should Gender Equality be Mandated?
Added Seminar & Panel Discussion
Monday, March 1, 12-2:30 pm
FREE, but reservations are required
Please RSVP to migs@mfa.no
Is government involvement needed to secure gender equality or are corporations already leading the way? Have the principles of gender equality been established or does the debate need to continue? Audun Lysbakken, Norwegian Minister of Children, Equality and Social Inclusion, addresses these topics in a key note address and seminar, with a panel discussion moderated by Michael Kimmel, Stony Brook University.
Hosted by The Norwegian Consulate General in New York, The New York Women’s Forum, Catalyst, and Innovation Norway.
Chronic Heart Failure: A Comparison Between Sweden & the United States
Lecture by Jan Mårtensson
Tuesday, March 2, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
Jan Mårtensson, visiting ASF scholar and Associate Professor of Nursing from the School of Health Sciences and Supervisor at the Primary Care Research and Development Unit in Jönköping, Sweden, compares follow-up care for heart disease patients in Sweden and the United States. Mårtensson also highlights the most important reforms that must be accomplished in heart disease and health care in the near future. Despite a continuing favorable trend in the occurrence of most cardiovascular diseases, heart failure is a significant and growing public health problem. More than 95% of admissions and days of hospitalization involve persons over 65 years of age. In Sweden this group of patients accounts for approximately 20% of all medical care events and 30% of all days of care due to heart disease. In the U.S. patients with heart failure account for about one-tenth of the Medicare population but over one-third of all Medicare spending, presenting an unsustainable burden as the population ages and the demand for in-hospital care increases.
The American Girl
Reading & book talk with Monika Fagerholm
Tuesday, March 9, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
In 1969, a young American girl named Eddie de Wire travels from Coney Island to the swampy coast of Finland and drowns in a marsh while wearing a red plastic raincoat, her premature death becoming part of local folklore. As her mythology builds, two imaginative and ferociously devoted young friends—Sandra and Doris, each with their own troubled history—search for hidden meaning and answers to Eddie’s demise. The girls construct their own world, their own language, and their own rules. But playing adult games has adult consequences, and what begins as two girls striking matches leads to an inferno that threatens to consume them and tear their worlds apart.
Gyrating from the swinging 60s to the mod early 70s, this complex narrative is kept on track by Fagerholm’s gifts as a storyteller. Part mysterious gothic saga, part chronicle of an era, and part a portrait of youth on the cusp of sexual awakening, The American Girl is a bewitching glimpse into the human psyche.
Already an international phenomenon, The American Girl from Scandinavian novelist Monika Fagerholm is simply unforgettable. A number one bestseller in Sweden and Finland, it has sold more than 200,000 copies to date, and has been sold in 13 countries. It is the recipient of the premier literary award in Sweden—The August Prize, as well as The Aniara Prize and The Gothenburg Post Award, and has been short-listed for The International IMPAC Literary Award.
Monika Fagerholm, one of Scandinavia’s most renowned authors, was born in Helsinki, Finland in 1961 and belongs to the Swedish-speaking community in Finland. Her much praised first novel, Wonderful Women by the Sea (New Press, 1997), won numerous awards, was short-listed for both the August Prize and the Finlandia Prize, and was made into a motion picture. With the publication of Diva in 1998, Fagerholm stirred up a cult-like following across Scandinavia and was awarded The Swedish Literature Society Award and Nyland’s Art Award.
The Viking in the Wheatfield: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest
Lecture & reading with Susan Dworkin
Tuesday, March 16, 6:30 pm
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
New York City author and journalist Susan Dworkin’s newest book takes the reader into the world of Bent Skovmand (1945-2007), a brilliant Danish plant scientist who fought to preserve and expand the world’s wheat supply. For 35 years Skovmand collected, multiplied, and documented the world’s wheat varieties, helping to protect the harvest against mutant plagues and revolutionary climate change. Before his untimely death in 2007, he worked to develop the so-called “Doomsday Vault” on Norway’s Arctic border where nations store their crop seeds under tons of ice and rock as insurance against catastrophe.
In an era when multinational corporations and governments often jealously guard breeding patents and information, Skovmand fought to keep his seed bank a center for free, open scientific exchange, as a service to breeders and farmers everywhere. When nations locked up their seeds, he fought to keep germplasm an internationally available public good. The Viking in the Wheatfield goes to the heart of the struggle to save the harvest, one seed at a time. Skovmand’s life casts a bright and welcome light on an agricultural sector – the international seed banks – upon which we are all crucially dependent and about which most of us know far too little. As Bent Skovmand often told visitors to his collection, “If the seeds disappear, so could your food. So could you.”
Dworkin has written several biographies, including The Nazi Officer’s Wife, and her articles have appeared in Ms., Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and numerous other magazines. Her fascination with agriculture dates from early stints at the United States Department of Agriculture and as a journalist covering aid programs in the Middle East. She lives in New York City and the Berkshires.
Fashion & Films
Thursday, March 11 & Thursday, March 18, both @ 6:30 pm
$9 ($6 ASF Members)
The moving image has represented and (re)interpreted fashion as a concept, an industry and as a cultural form since its inception. Subtly but strongly, fashion exists in the interstices of film aesthetics, possessing the ability to not only enhance a character’s persona and the drama of life, but also the capability to encourage critical response with regard to a film’s content, position in society, and relation to the human experience.
Scandinavia House presents a miniseries of screenings and lectures that closely examine fashion’s role in two Swedish films – Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night/Sommarnattens leende (1955) and Arne Mattsson’s Mannequin in Red/Mannekäng i rött (1958).
Smiles of a Summer Night/Sommarnattens leende
Film screening with lecture by Astrid Söderbergh Widding
Thursday, March 11, 6:30 pm
Directed by Ingmar Bergman (1955). The 1956 prize-winning comedy Smiles of a Summer Night ushered in an international audience for director Ingmar Bergman. Set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. When a weekend in the country brings them all face to face, the women ally to force the men’s hands in their matters of the heart, exposing their pretensions and insecurities along the way. Chock full of flirtatious propositions and sharp-witted wisdom, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of film history’s great tragicomedies, a bittersweet view of the transience of human carnality. 108 min.
Swedish costume designer and culture personality MAGO (Max Goldstein) designed the film’s costumes, firmly establishing an example of centralized cooperation between the two artists that lasted throughout the years and spanned many films. Whereas Bergman preferred his old leather jacket and beret, MAGO was a true elegant. However, they could unite their artistic vision for absolute quality. Their two artistic temperaments are as fascinating as they may seem out of date in an age rather dominated by effects and quantity.
Professor Astrid Söderbergh Widding is in the Cinema Studies Department and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at Stockholm University, Chair of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, and on the board of The Swedish Film Institute and The Swedish Fulbright Commission.
Mannequin in Red/Mannekäng i rött
Film screening with lecture by Louise Wallenberg
Thursday, March 18, 6:30 pm
Directed by Arne Mattsson (1958). A private detective doubling up as a fashion mannequin, a head designer with lesbian inclinations and a mean, wheelchair-based fashion house matron ominously accompanied by a white cat…welcome to the strange world of the couture salon “La Femme,” where the elegant surface soon starts to peel, revealing what’s hidden and repressed underneath. 108 min.
The combination of uncanny murders, romantic love and traditional comedy make this film one of a kind, thanks in part to director Arne Mattsson, dubbed the “Swedish Hitchcock” due to his daring framing and calculated use of color. What adds to its uniqueness are the costumes made by designer MAGO, who in the making of this film must have had the time of his life, designing effeminate fashion without – it seems – any limitation to his creativity and fantasy.
Dr. Louise Wallenberg will focus on the specific Mattssonian crime genre and its relation to the Italian giallo and to the crime genre as developed in Swedish cinema and literature. She will also focus on the meaning of the many costumes and on the implicit narrative that deals with women’s desire.
Wallenberg is the acting director of the Centre for Fashion Studies and holds a PhD in Cinema Studies (2002) from Stockholm University.
Conditions of Architecture & Current Works
Lecture by Craig Dykers
Tuesday, March 30, 7 pm
$10 ($8 ASF Members, FREE to Students with a valid ID)
A companion lecture to the exhibition SNØHETTA architecture – landscape – interior, Snøhetta co-founder Craig Dykers will present recent works from the Snøhetta office and discuss contemporary conditions in architectural practice that the firm is evaluating.
Dykers co-founded the architecture and design firm in 1989 – the same year the firm won the international competition to design the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Snøhetta established a New York office in 2004, the year it was awarded the commission for the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center.
The international practice emphasizes site-specific and environmentally responsible design solutions that “enhance…qualities of place and create diverse and rich architectural experiences.” Featured in a multi-faceted exhibition at Scandinavia House on view through April 3, 2010, SNØHETTA architecture – landscape – interior offers insight into the design and construction of the firm’s most important works and includes films, photographs, drawings, models, and interactive learning devices.
A Blaze in the Northern Sky:
Norwegian Black Metal & the Culture that Spawned it
Thursday, April 29, 7 pm
$10 ($8 ASF Members)
In the last two decades, a bizarre, intense, and violent musical subculture called Black Metal has emerged in Norway, and has subsequently become a worldwide phenomenon. In a unique seminar-meets-radio show format moderated by Patrizia Mazzuoccolo, the lecture will explore and promote the genre and its country through audio clips of bands, interviews with musicians and guests, and an audience Q & A session.
Black Metal is a distinctive mix of Satanism, Nordic mythology, and extreme heavy metal. It is the basis of a Norwegian subculture that aggressively forsakes Christianity and mainstream society in favor of Norse mythology, epic Scandinavian nature, and self-inflicted isolation. This violent subculture attracted international attention in the early 1990s with a string of murders, suicides, grave desecrations, and the arson of over 20 Christian churches.
Participants include (via Skype or media feed):
Harald Fossberg, first singer in TURBONEGRO and a veteran of the punk and metal scene in Norway. Currently works as the main rock / metal entertainment journalist for Norwegian broadsheet, Aftenposten;
Nocturno Culto, guitarist, bassist, and songwriter half of legendary Oslo-based band, DARKTHRONE;
Gaahl, ex-GORGOROTH vocalist now performing with folk-inspired crew WARDRUNA and recently recruited by the Bergen Theatre Den Nationale Scene for the role of Heimdal in the play Svartediket which has caused more controversy in Norway.
Moderator:
Patrizia Mazzuoccolo has worked as a music journalist for over 10 years contributing to magazines like Metal Hammer (UK), Terrorizer (UK), Rock Sound (UK), and Metal Maniacs (US), and still writes for Rhythm, where in 2002-2003 she had her own metal column. She worked as a Promotions Producer for the Sky Television network in London from 1998 - 2002, did screen work on MTV2's The Riot (2002), and freelanced for The Rock Show on BBC Radio One in connection with the Norwegian black metal special (2006).
Mazzuoccolo lived in London for 14 years, in Oslo for 6 and currently resides in New York where she is writing a book on the subject of Norwegian metal and culture.
During her time in Oslo, Mazzuoccolo worked as a Marketing and Promotion officer for Moonfog Productions, label manager for Tabu Recordings, acted as consultant and co-organizer of the sold-out Scandinavian metal night at SXSW (2008) and was the co-creator, roving reporter and producer of popular metal show Tinitus on Norwegian national radio NRK P3 from 2005 until early 2009 (www.nrk.no/tinitus).
The Sixth Annual PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature
Friday, April 30 & Saturday, May 1
FREE, no tickets or reservations required; seating is first-come first-served
The 2010 PEN World Voices Festival will be held from April 26 to May 2 at venues throughout New York City and will focus on the freedom of expression and the international fellowship of writers. This annual showcase of writers from all over the world consists of several days of public panels, literary conversations, readings, and tributes. By convening international writers to discuss their relationships to their public and private selves, PEN World Voices aims to expand the dialogue on essential aspects of the human experience that promises to play a crucial role in the interactions of nations, peoples, and individuals for the foreseeable future.
The Poetry of Edward Hopper
Friday, April 30, 1 – 2 pm
The great American painter of solitude returns brilliantly illuminated and transformed by the Catalan poet Ernest Farrés, whose recent publication Edward Hopper is a collection of poems based on the artist’s paintings. New York poet Edward Hirsh, who has also written about Hopper, joins Farrés for a conversation about the power of Hopper’s imagery to invoke poetry.
Participants: Ernest Farrés and Edward Hirsh
Ernest Farrés (Catalonia/Spain) is a journalist and writer. He works for the cultural supplement of La Vanguardia newspaper. He is the author of three volumes of poetry in Catalan: Clavar-ne una al mall i l’altra a l’enclusa (Hit or Miss), Mosquits (Mosquitoes), and Edward Hopper.
Edward Hirsch (United States) a MacArthur Fellow, was born in Chicago in 1950. He has published seven books of poems including, For the Sleepwalkers, Wild Gratitude, Special Orders, and, most recently, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems. He has also written four prose books, including Poet’s Choice.
Cosponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation and Institut Ramon Llull
Short Stories: Past, Present, and Future
Friday, April 30, 3:30 – 5 pm
What virtues and challenges are unique to the short story? How flexible is the form? And why is it that, even now—after Poe, Chekov, Hemingway, O’Connor, Nabokov, and Munro—the short story often gets less respect, in terms of prizes and critical esteem, than the novel? Join acclaimed practitioners of the form from Bosnia, Israel, China, Mexico, and the United States, for a conversation with The New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman about the past, present, and future of the short story.
Participants: Preston L. Allen, Alex Epstein, Aleksandar Hemon, Yiyun Li, and Martin Solares
Moderated by Deborah Treisman
Preston L. Allen (United States) is the author of the critically acclaimed novels All or Nothing and Jesus Boy and the award-winning collection Churchboys and Other Sinners. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and journals and have been anthologized in Brown Sugar, Miami Noir, and Las Vegas Noir. Allen is the recipient of a State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship.
Alex Epstein (Russia/Israel) is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. He was awarded Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. His short-short stories have appeared in English in Words Without Borders, The Iowa Review, and other journals. His forthcoming novel is titled Blue Has No South.
Aleksandar Hemon (Bosnia/U.S.) is the author of The Lazarus Project, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and three collections of short stories: The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Love and Obstacles. He edited the Best European Fiction 2010. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.
Yiyun Li (China/U.S.) is the winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/ PEN Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. The author of The Vagrants and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Li was selected for a Whiting Award, and by Granta as one of the best young American novelists. Her next collection of stories, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, will be published in September.
Martin Solares (Mexico) is a fiction writer and critic. He received the Efraín Huerta National Literary Award in 1998 for his short story “El Planeta Cloralex.” Los Minuts Negros (The Black Minutes) was shortlisted for the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize and has been published in Spanish, English, and German.
Deborah Treisman (United States) has been fiction editor of The New Yorker since 2003. Previously, she was the managing editor of Grand Street, and has been a member of the editorial staffs of The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, and The Threepenny Review. Her translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Harper’s, and Grand Street.
Cosponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation
Peter Schneider and Paul Auster in Conversation
Friday, April 30, 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Award-winning German author Peter Schneider, who has published over 20 novels, screenplays, and volumes of journalistic essays since his first novel, Lenz, in 1973, will be interviewed by Brooklyn-based Paul Auster, whose works including The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy are studies of American urban existential dread. Come listen as the two authors compare notes on their literary maps and oeuvres, homelands real and imagined, and their common journeys as authors over the past few tumultuous decades.
Participants: Paul Auster and Peter Schneider
Paul Auster (United States) is the best-selling author of Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. He has been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and the Edgar Award. Auster’s work has been translated into thirty-five languages.
Peter Schneider (Germany) published his first novel Lenz in 1973. More than twenty other novels, screenplays, and volumes of essays followed, including Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy), and Paarungen (Couplings). Since 2001, he has been the Roth Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University.
Cosponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation
War and the Novel
Saturday, May 1, 12:30 – 2 pm
Filip Florian’s novel Little Fingers imagines the discovery of a mass grave in a small town. Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone depicts a woman who must nurse her husband while besieged by violence in Afghanistan. In CrocAttack, Assaf Gavron invents a reluctant media celebrity, famous because he did not die in a terrorist attack. And Bernardo Atxaga, in The Accordionist’s Son, has revisited the Spanish Civil War and examined its long repercussions. Why have novelists so long been drawn to the subject of war? And how do writers engage with this fraught and complicated subject? Join novelists from Afghanistan, Spain, Romania, and Israel as they discuss these and many other questions.
Participants: Bernardo Atxaga, Filip Florian, Assaf Gavron, and Atiq Rahimi
Bernardo Atxaga (Spain) is a writer of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays, children’s books, and screenplays for radio and film. He began publishing in his native language of Euskara in the 1970s. Atxaga’s Obabakoak was awarded the Spanish National Literature Prize in 1989 and has been translated into twenty-five languages. His most recent novel, The Accordionist’s Son, was published in 2008.
Filip Florian (Romania) worked as a journalist and reporter for Radio Free Europe. Little Fingers, his first novel, has received numerous awards, including Best Debut Novel from the Romanian Writers Union.
Assaf Gavron (Israel) is an author, translator, and musician. He has published five books of fiction and his short stories have appeared in various anthologies and publications. Among the many works he has translated from English into Hebrew are the novels of Jonathan Safran Foer, Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, and 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger.
Atiq Rahimi (Afghanistan/France) is recognized as both a writer and a renowned maker of documentary and feature films. The film of his novel Earth and Ashes was in the Official Selection at Cannes Festival in 2004. He is currently adapting one of his novels, A Thousand Rooms of Dreams and Fear, for the screen. Since 2001, Rahimi has returned to Afghanistan to set up a Writers’ House in Kabul to offer support and training for young Afghan writers and filmmakers. His latest novel is The Patience Stone.
Cosponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation
The Essay
Saturday, May 1, 5:30 – 6:30 pm
Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse such as Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man contribute to the form’s rich history. Brevity is often a defining principle, but the opposite holds true as well, with examples such as John Locke’s voluminous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. These writers, all of them accomplished essayists, discuss the form — its great history, its restraints, freedoms, and challenges.
Participants: Quim Monzó, Peter Schneider, and Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Moderated by Susan Harris, editorial director, Words Without Borders
Quim Monzó (Catalonia/Spain) is the recipient of the National Award for fiction, the City of Barcelona Award, the Prudenci Bertrana Award, the El Temps Award for best novel, the Lletra d’Or Prize, and the Catalan Writers’ Award. He has also won Serra d’Or magazine’s Critics’ Award four times and is a contributor to the La Vanguardia newspaper. Most of his novels are written in Catalan, including the most recent, Mil Cretins.
Peter Schneider (Germany) published his first novel Lenz in 1973. More than twenty other novels, screenplays, and volumes of essays followed, including Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper), Extreme Mittelage (The German Comedy), and Paarungen (Couplings). Since 2001, he has been the Roth Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint (France/Belgium) has written seven novels and several films. His work has been compared to the work of Samuel Beckett, and the films of Jacques Tati and Jim Jarmusch. Running Away was awarded the Prix Médicis in 2005. He is included in Best European Fiction 2010. His forthcoming books are Self-Portrait Abroad and The Truth About Marie.
Susan Harris (United States) is the editorial director of Words Without Borders. With Ilya Kaminsky, she is the coeditor of the most recent Words Without Borders anthology, The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.
Cosponsored by The American-Scandinavian Foundation and Words Without Borders
Participating Nordic Authors
Please visit www.pen.org for schedule and more details.
Naja Marie Aidt (Denmark) has published nine collections of poetry and three collections of short stories. She is included in Best European Fiction 2010. Aidt has also written several plays, children’s books, song lyrics, and the screenplay for the feature film Strings. In 2008, her collection Bavian received the most prestigious literary prize awarded in the Nordic countries, the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.
Jostein Gaarder (Norway) is the author of Sophie’s World, which has been translated into 53 languages and has sold over 30 million copies. His other works include children’s books and adult novels such as The Solitaire Mystery, Through a Glass, Darkly, Vita Brevis, among many others. Gaarder has been involved in the promotion of human rights and sustainable development for several years, establishing the Sophie Prize, an annual international environment and development prize.
Frederic Hauge (Norway) established the Bellona Foundation in 1986. Through investigation, documentation, legal action, and nonviolent activism, Bellona has brought changes in environmental policies in Norway and internationally. Today, Bellona is an international scientific and technology-based environmental NGO. In 2007 Hauge was elected vice chairman of the European Commission’s Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants, and TIME Magazine named him a Hero of the Environment.
Karl O. Knausgaard (Norway) made his debut with the novel Ute Av Verden (Out of the World). A Time for Everything, his second novel and his first to be published in English, was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. The first volume of his celebrated six-volume Min Kamp (My Struggle) received Norway’s prestigious Brage Prize in 2009.
Bjørn Lomborg (Denmark) is the organizer and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, which brings together some of the world’s top economists to set priorities for the world. In 2008 he was named “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by the UK Guardian, “one of the top 100 public intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines, and “one of the world’s 75 most influential people of the 21st century” by Esquire.
Sofi Oksanen (Finland) is the author of the novels Stalin’s Cows, Baby Jane, and most recently, Purge. Purge — the first book to win both of Finland’s top literary awards, the Finlandia and the Runeberg — is based on her acclaimed and controversial play of the same name, originally staged at the National Theater in Helsinki. In 2009, Oksanen was named Estonia’s Person of the Year.
Janne Teller (Denmark) is the author of Odin’s Island, which has been translated into five languages. Her second novel, Nothing, written for young adults, was awarded the Danish Cultural Ministry Prize for best children’s book of 2001, as well as the prestigious Le Prix Libbylit 2008 for best novel for children in the French-speaking world.
Eco Chic-related Programs @ Scandinavia House
Symposium - Towards Sustainable Fashion
Directly followed by the Opening Party for Eco Chic in Volvo Hall
Tuesday, May 4, 6:30 pm, Victor Borge Hall
Please note this program is now full. We apologize for any inconvenience, but still encourage you to attend the opening party and exhibition viewing for Eco Chic – Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion the same evening at 7:30 pm
A symposium, in conjunction with the opening of the exhibit Eco Chic - Towards Sustainable Fashion, with fashion designers who take an environmentally-friendly and ethical approach to their work, without sacrificing style. The panel of speakers includes designers and fashion experts from Sweden and the United States - Marcus Bergman, Karin Stenmar, Sass Brown and Eviana Hartman, and is moderated by Dr. Hazel Clark, Dean of the School of Art and Design and Theory, Parsons: The New School for Design.
The symposium is followed by a party celebrating the opening of the exhibit Eco Chic - Towards Sustainable Fashion at Scandinavia House, with music by Markus Görsch (of Love is all) and Gary Olson (of Ladybug Transistor & Marlborough Farms) . The exhibit will remain open until 9:30 pm.
Marcus Bergman is one of the partners of Bergman's (a part of the exhibition). Bergman is a researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg and lecturer at University College of Borås. For more information, please visit www.ecocotton.com/.
Karin Stenmar is one of the two founders of Dem Collective (a part of the exhibition). Since 2004 Karin and Annika Axelsson have ensured that Sweden receives a steady supply of fair produced and organic clothes from Dem Collective's own factories in Sri Lanka. For more information, please visit www.demcollective.com/.
Sass Brown is a full time professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, now resident in Florence, Italy, where she is the Resident Director for FIT's study abroad program. Originally from London, England, Sass established herself as a designer with her own signature collection selling across Canada, and as VP of Merchandising for Perry Ellis Kids. As an academic, Sass's area of research is in the area of community outreach and ethical design practices in fashion based businesses. Sass has published papers and spoken around the world on the topic of sustainable design. She has also worked and volunteered in women's cooperatives in Latin America, and in particular in Brazil's largest favela - Rocinha, as well as taught workshops to manufacturers and fashion enterprises in Peru.
Eviana Hartman, founder and designer Bodkin. Hartman was the fashion features editor at NYLON, fashion writer at Vogue and Teen Vogue, and the founding columnist of EcoWise in The Washington Post. She collaborated with designer Wendy Mullin on the Sew U series of books for Little, Brown and Potter Craft, and has written about music, style, architecture, and design for such publications as Dwell, I.D., Purple Fashion, VMan, Domino, and Wired. Her interest in sustainability began while studying under architect William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle. She is also a modern dancer and plays drums in the band Open Ocean.
Dr. Hazel Clark is Dean of the School of Art and Design History at Parsons the New School for Design. She is a design historian and theorist who has taught internationally and has a particular interest in design and culture, and fashion and textiles including ethical practices. Her most recent publications include co-editing Old Clothes, New Looks: Second Hand Fashion (Berg, 2005), The Fabric of Cultures: Fashion, Identity and Globalization (Routledge, 2009) and Design Studies: A Reader (Berg, 2009). Her articles include: SLOW + FASHION - An Oxymoron or a Promise for the Future..?, Fashion Theory, 12: 4, December 2008.
Talk and Walk
Eco-Fashion Going Green & Eco Chic – Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion
Wednesday, June 9, 10:30 am
FREE, but registration is required
For information and to register, please visit www.fitnyc.edu/museum
Join us for a walk through New York City visiting two exhibitions that highlight sustainability in fashion. First have a tour with curator Jennifer Farley of The Museum at FIT’s Eco-Fashion: Going Green and then visit Eco Chic – Towards Sustainable Swedish Fashion at Scandinavia House.
Meeting point: The Museum at FIT, 10:30 am, 7th Avenue (@ 27th Street), continuing to Scandinavia House
This event is organized in collaboration with The Museum at FIT. For information, visit www.fitnyc.edu.
Past Lectures & Literary Events 2009
Sverre Fehn: The Pattern of Thoughts
Book Talk and Lecture by Per Olaf Fjeld
Monday, September 21, 6:30 pm
FREE
As recipient of the 1997 Pritzker Architecture Prize – the profession’s highest honor – architect Sverre Fehn received critical acclaim in his native Norway and internationally. 
His projects, often described as being instilled with a human quality, were strongly influenced by Scandinavia’s breathtaking landscape and light conditions. 
Sverre Fehn: The Pattern of Thoughts provides an intimate glimpse into the world of this great post-war modernist architect known for his design sensibility and complex creative process. Oslo School of Architecture and Design Professor Per Olaf Fjeld presents both biography and perceptive critiques as he covers Fehn’s unique approach to architecture.
Co-presented with The Monacelli Press.
New Scandinavian Cuisine:
The Scandinavian Cookbook with Trine Hahnemann
Tuesday, September 29, 6:30 pm
FREE
More than a mere collection of recipes, chef and food author Trine Hahnemann’s latest book The Scandinavian Cookbook promotes fresh ideas in new Scandinavian cooking and food culture. Hahnemann lives in Denmark and has worked as a chef since the early 90s. Hahnemann will give a talk on the uniqueness of new Nordic food, the evening concludes with a question and answer session, book-signing, and reception.
Co-presented with the Consulate General of Denmark, New York.
Sponsored by Arla Foods.
Designing The Hamsun Centre:
A Lecture with the Architect Steven Holl
Monday, October 5, 6:30 pm
$10 ($8 ASF members)
The Knut Hamsun Centre opened in Hamarøy, Norway, in August of this year to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Hamsun’s birth. Architect Steven Holl, who designed the centre, will delve into the concept behind it: “building as a body; battleground of invisible forces” and the process undertaken to actualize the building.
Influenced by Hamsun’s explorations of the intricacies of the human mind, the building was conceived as an archetypal and intensified compression of spirit in space and light, and as the realization of a Hamsun character in architectonic terms.
Hamsun, Norway’s most innovative writer of the 20th century, fabricated new forms of expression in his first novel, the ground-breaking Hunger (Sult). With the publication of later novels such as Pan, Mysteries (Mysterier), Growth of the Soil (Markens Grøde), he established the foundation of a truly modern school of fiction. Hamsun’s work has been particularly inspiring to filmmakers, which is evident in the more than 17 films based on and inspired by his writings. His brilliant literary career was offset later in life by political turmoil. Hamsun's long-standing admiration for Germany made him sympathetic to the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, and consequently one of Norway’s most controversial figures.
http://www.stevenholl.com/project-detail.php?type=museums&id=39 http://www.arcspace.com/architects/Steven_Holl/hamsun_museum/
Co-presented by the Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York.
Fresh! From Finland: Culinary Adventure
Wednesday, October 28, 7 pm
$25 ($20 ASF members)
This event is now full and is no longer accepting reservations
A relatively unknown culinary destination, Finland is living a remarkable food renaissance.
Numerous Finnish restaurants are utilizing fresh local produce, 
attracting both Michelin Stars and praise from international press. Finnish cuisine is a delicate mixture of East and West - Scandinavian cooking spiced up with some Russian influence. Ingredients harvested from the clean waters and abundant forests of Finland serve both as the inspiration and as the raw material for kitchen. 
Scandinavia House is celebrating Finnish culinary culture in October by bringing the fresh flavors of Finnish cuisine to New York. Some of the best chefs of Finland are spicing up the menus of Smörgås Chef Restaurant @ Scandinavia House for a week with exciting Finnish dishes. The Shop @ Scandinavia House will feature a special Fresh! From Finland section with Finnish food products, 
cooking books and other dining related items.
This one night special food demonstration and tasting event offers the possibility to familiarize yourself with delicious and surprising flavors of Finland from the Southern archipelagos to the Arctic North. Chefs from Finland demonstrate various cooking techniques with a reception featuring a sampling of Finnish delicacies to follow.
Special Menu for Finnish Food Week @ Smörgås Chef Restaurant @ Scandinavia House:
Cream of sunchoke with King crabs legs
Lamb rack with rosemary and lemon sauce
Sea buckthorn with vanilla flavored skyr
Fresh! from Finland is produced by the Consulate General of Finland in New York with the support of Benecol, Finland Cheese, Iittala and Visit Finland.
Eero Saarinen: Form-Giver at Mid-Century - A Lecture by Architect Der Scutt
Wednesday, November 11, 2009, 6.30 pm, $15 ($10 ASF, ASS and Finlandia Foundation members)
Presented at the Museum of the City of New York from November 10, 2009 through January 31, 2010, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future is the first retrospective of this architect’s career, which was one of the most prolific, unorthodox, and controversial in the history of 20th-century architecture. From the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport and the St. Louis Gateway Arch to the Pedestal Chair for Knoll Associates, Saarinen (1910-1961) created some of the most potent expressions of American identity after World War II. Saarinen’s clients constituted a who’s who of the era’s most prominent industries and institutions. For them he designed buildings that advanced the expansion of higher education to the promotion of automobile culture and air travel, popular forms of entertainment like television, and the newest information technologies. Featuring sketches, working drawings, models, photographs, furnishings, films, and other ephemera, the exhibition examines the architect’s career from the 1930s through the early 1960s.
To celebrate this exhibition Finlandia Foundation New York Metropolitan Chapter and the American-Scandinavian Society have organized an evening at Scandinavian House: The Nordic Center in America in honor of Eero Saarinen. Der Scutt, FAIA Architect, will tell us more about Saarinen in words and pictures. We will have a chance to meet and greet with Susan Saarinen, Eero Saarinen’s daughter, as she is our guest of honor at this event.
A reception to follow the lecture.
About Der Scutt:
Der Scutt, FAIA is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning architect. His skyscrapers, including high-rise office and residential buildings, can be seen throughout Manhattan's skyline. His projects include numerous corporate headquarters, museums, research laboratories, and residences.
Scutt was in New Haven during Saarinen's relocation and was thus able to witness firsthand the construction of some of Saarinen's notable achievements. He visited most of the projects illustrated in the talk.
Both Saarinen and Scutt (first in his class) were honor graduates of Yale University School of Architecture. Yale produced many of the most famous architects practicing today.
Scutt became close friends with Aline Saarinen, Eero's second wife and consequently was able to visit with Saarinen on several occasions. Growing up with and travelling through Saarinen’s projects gave Scutt a unique position in discussing this great architect's work.
Der Scutt works and lives in New York with his Finnish wife, Leena Scutt of Mikkeli, Finland.
Info:
Reservations must be made by November 9, 2009 with payment and checks made payable to American Scandinavian Society. For more information please call Leena Scutt 212.744.0813 or email information@finlandiafoundationny.org
Related event:
Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future
Museum of the City of New York
November 10, 2009 – January 31, 2010
More information at the following links:
http://www.mcny.org/exhibitions/future/eero-saarinen.html
http://www.eerosaarinen.net/project.shtml
Energy and Architecture: How Green is Green?
Monday, November 16, 6:30 pm
$10 ($8 ASF members)
A panel discussion including American and Danish architects will analyze the benefits, compromises, and challenges in creating and designing sustainable buildings and communities in the U.S. and Denmark. 
The panel, which includes architects Stephen Kieran of the well-known Philadelphia firm Kieran Timberlake and Bjarke Ingels, head of the architectural practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), will explore the differences and similarities in the energy-saving measures used by architects in each country. Since the U.S. and Denmark vary greatly in size, climatic conditions, and commonly-used building materials and energy-saving features, the discussion will examine how each country can learn from the other. The moderator of the discussion is Suzanne Stephens, deputy editor of Architectural Record.
Co-Presented with Architectural Record and the Consulate General of Denmark, New York.
Low Carbon Growth?
Perspectives for the UN Conference on Climate Change
Monday, November 23, 6 – 8 pm
$50
Advance reservations are required. Please call 212.847.9740
The five Nordic-American Chambers of Commerce and The American-Scandinavian Foundation join together to host this United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 15, event where the panel will consist of the five Nordic Ambassadors to the UN, H.E. Carsten Staur (Denmark), H.E. Jarmo Viinanen (Finland), H.E. Dr. Gunnar Pálsson (Iceland), H.E. Morten Wetland (Norway), and H.E. Anders A. Lidén (Sweden), who will discuss the upcoming conference in Copenhagen, December 7th through 18th. A reception will follow.
Co-presented in collaboration with the five Nordic American Chambers of Commerce of New York.