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Cecilia Lagerström

Professor

Performing Arts
Mail
cecilia.lagerstrom@hsm.gu.se
Visiting address
Eklandagatan 86
41259 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 210
Göteborg

About Cecilia Lagerström

Cecilia Lagerström is a director, researcher, and Professor of Performance Practices at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. She has a background in physical theatre and has directed performances in theatres and other venues since 1993. She earned her PhD in Performance Studies in 2003, and since 2005 has been involved in developing artistic research within the field of theatre in Sweden. Her practice moves between theatre (often movement-based), performance, and artistic research.

During 2023–26, Cecilia is conducting the research project The Sugar Games: New Perspectives on Gothenburg’s Colonial History through the Handling of Sugar (funded by the Swedish Research Council). The project explores and highlights Gothenburg’s colonial history—a history that has largely been ignored and forgotten. The focus is on the colonial sugar trade and the movement of sugar through the city, with the aim of generating new perspectives on this history. The project takes its starting point in a diary from 1836, which leads to six locations in the city. Here, various colonial traces or narratives are unearthed across different layers of time, which are brought into play with one another. This new map of Gothenburg becomes a living document that is continuously developed into a form of anti-colonial cartography. Artists and other collaborators are invited to participate in exploratory mappings, city walks, and the creation of new artistic works in response to the sites. This generates more complex, as well as embodied, relational, and pluralistic perspectives on Gothenburg’s colonial history, and gives rise to a new map of the city that connects past and present.

During 2025–26, Cecilia is also leading the communication project Sugar Walks – Through the Future’s Decolonised Gothenburg (Swedish Research Council), together with researcher and artist Monica Sand. The aim is to disseminate the results of The Sugar Games to a broader audience by challenging the city’s colonial history and its future through a series of guided city walks—“sugar walks.” The project is carried out in close collaboration with the Gothenburg City Museum, as well as groups of artists, researchers, upper secondary school students, and university students.

In 2021–22, Cecilia was engaged in the research platform Hidden Sites, a collaboration between the Gothenburg City Museum and the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (University of Gothenburg), primarily in a new initiative to create new or alternative narratives about the historical and contemporary site Lilla Änggården. Archival work on site generated material for what later became The Sugar Games.

In 2019–20, Cecilia was a co-researcher in the international collaboration The Kraken Skool of Finance – Spectral Collaborations (Swedish Research Council, 2019–20; researcher leader Karmenlara Ely). The project explored the Nordic countries’ involvement in the transatlantic slave trade with the Caribbean. The work took the form of a collaborative, performative card game involving embodied actions, street rituals, temporary memorials, and collective conversations as part of anti-colonial work.

During 2017–19, Cecilia directed and led a series of performance projects investigating complex dramaturgies in relation to movement-based and interdisciplinary theatre practices and socially engaged issues. The performances Suffering: On Our Perception of Pain, Xenophobia, and Nuckan: The Epilogue, created with the artist collective Alkemisterna, were staged at Atalante and Folkteatern in Gothenburg.

Between 2013 and 2016, Cecilia carried out the project GångART together with actor and tightrope walker Helena Kågemark. The project applied theatrical techniques and strategies to walking actions in urban spaces, primarily in Gothenburg, aiming to propose new ways of experiencing everyday patterns, activating attention, and creating everyday poetry. The project was presented in various forums and formats in collaboration with museums, galleries, artistic platforms, and public urban spaces, including the Museum of World Culture and Konstepidemin. The book The Art of Walking: Exercises in Attentive Walking was published by Gidlunds in 2019.

At the Academy, Cecilia has long served as Head of Research and Doctoral Studies in Performance Practices (2008–2024), supervising and teaching PhD candidates and Master’s students.

Cecilia regularly undertakes assignments as a guest teacher and workshop leader, as well as serving as an external examiner, member of assessment committees, and advisor in research contexts in various countries. She is active in several international research networks and artistic platforms. Her research interests include performance with a focus on site-creative and site-critical practices, physical theatre training in relation to directing and dramaturgy, decolonial perspectives on place and the body, performative writing, and walking as art.