Territorial Art, Design & Architecture
(2022)
author(s): Sergio Montero Bravo
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
This collaborative and cross-sectoral project addresses places, environments and spaces beyond mere functional urban endeavors. The project explores possibilities that become visible when public space is viewed from perspectives beyond the urban norm. The aim is to restore lost rural relations and to search for ways to leave the anthropocentric narrative. In the past, densification of cities has been considered synonymous with sustainable development, creativity and innovation. However, a one-sided urban focus leads to disarmament of rural habitats, and dissociation from human interdependence with non-human nature. Today, adaptation to global warming is dependent on the survival of the rural. Therefore, this artistic research project is primarily informed by activities in rural environments together with species and ecologies other than human and urban. The goal is to investigate how art, design and architectural interventions can foster oppositional narratives to anthropocentricity. What I present in this exposition are my most recent collaborations and a journey of professional metamorphosis to reach this goal. The result is a series of ongoing projects and processes that demonstrate how I explore places of communality, togetherness and mutual beneficial interdependency between species.
Haunted houses
(2021)
author(s): Emelie Carlén
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
This exposition uncovers the thought process behind and around the artworks Haunted Houses and Cold Readings. I focus my research on the two modernist buildings of E1027 and Villa Müller and the architects behind them. Through the production of these works I have been concerned with how narratives about these houses have been constructed and re-told – and how these narratives have changed as they have been 'rehearsed'. I have applied the methodology of rehearsal to my process in order to outline how historical writings and archival research can be used with the aim of finding alternative outcomes to what has already been written and said.
Piskan ställningen
(2021)
author(s): Livia Prawitz
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
The courtyard, laundry room, and areas for beating carpets are collective facilities in the private sphere of the home. In Stockholm you can find carpet hangers in connection to many apartment blocks even though they are very seldom used nowadays. The act of whipping carpets is an act that aims to get rid of the dirt – the remnants of life. Cleaning is a repetitive work, where something needs to be done over and over again without it producing something new.
The project Piskan ställningen consists of an essay, sound pieces, and sketches in different materials and is divided into three parts; the one who beats, the beater itself, and that which constitutes a stand for the beating. The various associations to the carpet hanger and the carpet beater form the basis of the project that centres around questions concerning repetition and productivity, place and time, the boundary between the public and the domestic sphere, and how dangerous the pursuit of alleged purity, hygiene, science, and light can be. Through text, sound and images, personal and collective memories, and the object's associations regarding reproductive labour, city planning, violence, the welfare project, and childish games are intertwined.
The material also contains other associations to control and power – with the whip as a means of threat and punishment, and an exploration of different forms of emptiness in relation to architecture, social structures, and mental space. Through a younger and an elderly woman's narrative voice, we follow an associative thought chain that interweaves the public, the domestic, and a bodily sphere. The setting is a society where she comes home from work to yet another form of monotonous routines, where cars get burned down, and tables are placed under vases, whilst someone has been digging a hole down in the city.
Through sketches in different materials, I approach the carpet beater by exploring its shape. My attempts to repeat the knots lead to a series of variations on the memory of whips where mistakes constitute the basis of new forms. In the project repetition and variations in sound, text, and drawing becomes another way of approaching repetitive work
Methods of Indirection: a trialogue between Patrizia Bach, Howard Eiland, and Luis Berríos-Negrón about Walter Benjamin and translating The Arcades Project
(2020)
author(s): Luis Berríos-Negrón, Patrizia Bach, Howard Eiland
published in: Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Walter Benjamin deemed his Arcades Project [Das Passagen-Werk (Mit Bindestrich und Werk mit Capital W)] “the theatre of all my struggles and all my ideas.” As a vast accumulation of materials, it had become for him a literary laboratory for testing social, critical, and spatial ideas. The co-authors here present an exposition where they look to reactivate that ‘theatre’ to search, test, and draw from each other alternative recursions for their respective practices. Their respective discourses are intersected through a voluntary 'trialogue' that plays between three different roles aiming to diverge from the traditional form of a Q&A. The exchanges gravitate around ‘greenhouse’ as the historiographic display structure to the Arcades, as well as to Global Warming. But, the format also triggers ‘indirections’ urging unforeseen aspects that may further research and revisions of the Arcades. For the authors, such indirections actualise and translate, yet again, other dormant aspects of each others perceptions about Benjamin. Ultimately, joined by the attitude to share and reactivate that ‘theatre-laboratory’ with you—the reader and exposition visitor—the actors look for cues that encourage further procedures of experimentation and reflexion.
Radical Inside
(2020)
author(s): Palle Torsson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
The goal of this work and of my research is to broaden our understanding of contemporary creative conditions in relation to how technologically constructed systems enable cultural production. The work explores specific systems and pushes the limits of their intended use.
In the process, I also hope to reveal the relationship between digital systems and transformative subjects. The work Radical Inside explores 3D models from the largest sharing platform for 3D content. A multiplicity of possibilities opens up as a shift in camera perspective reveals the internal structure of the 3D models. The reorientation points to criticism of how society is structured and imagined by the heteronormative gaze. The unusual angle displaces the normative placement of the model within a reduced and rigid system - the taxonomy and categorization of the platform. From within, I can highlight and explore technology as a fundamentally surreal and queer possibility.
The Life of an Itinerant through a Pinhole
(2020)
author(s): Behzad Khosravi Noori
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
Between 1956 and 1968, the photographer Gholamreza Amirbegi captured a wealth of images from around his neighborhood in southwestern Tehran. At the time the city had just seen a major influx of working-class immigrants from the country’s smaller municipalities. By re-narrating these materials, which evoke not only particular, local memories, but also distinct subaltern histories, this overlooked archive tells stories of social change from below in Iran, as seen in Gholamreza’s subjects: global cinematic images, and unconscious colonial memory. By applying a comparative historical-material analysis, Khosravi Noori’s aim here is to develop a practice based, multi-sited archaeology of contemporary history. This approach begins with an excavation of the historical materials themselves, in order to both discover lost identities in these images, and to displace them from sedimented historical positions. In doing this, he asks the question: What happens to the past from the vantage point of the future?
jag vet hur folkhemmet luktar
(2020)
author(s): tina carlsson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research, Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
jag vet hur folkhemmet luktar is an interdisciplinary project that attempts to show a more complex picture of the Swedish folkhem (“people’s home” – a term used to describe the vision of a better life for all by Swedish social democracy). The project is a response to the romanticised and idealised image of the folkhem which, in the current political climate, is mainly propagated by the far right with the populist and racist Swedish Democrats (SD) at the forefront. Using the artists own “folkhem-marinated” body as a point of departure, the exposition sketches the nodes from which the folkhem unfolded and how that created the preconditions for certain people to feel at home while others were excluded. In mapping the “folkhem nodes” photographic documentation, notes of childhood memories and a conversation with the father is used. The project investigates how the folkhem ideology was implemented through a linguistic as well as a spatial and material aesthetics. The textual memories are contextualized through a system of footnotes, that in the exposition are shown in pop-up windows and act as a commenting and associative parallel text to the memory narratives.
This exposition uncovers the thought process behind and around the artworks Haunted Houses and Cold Readings. I focus my research on the two modernist buildings of E1027 and Villa Müller and the architects behind them. Through the production of these works I have been concerned with how narratives about these houses have been constructed and re-told – and how these narratives have changed as they have been 'rehearsed'. I have applied the methodology of rehearsal to my process in order to outline how historical writings and archival research can be used with the aim of finding alternative outcomes to what has already been written and said.open exposition comments (0)